EMPIRES OF
THE MONSOON

A History of the Indian Oceanand its Invaders

RICHARD HALL

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

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

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Richard Hall 1996

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

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

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

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Source ISBN: 9780006380832

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Version: 2018–10–09

DEDICATION

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

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Foreword

A Note on Spellings

PART ONE: A World Apart

1. Wonders of India, Treasures of China

2. Lure of the African Shore

3. The Mystery of the Waqwaqs

4. Islam Rules in the Land of Zanj

5. On the Silk Route to Cathay

6. A Princess for King Arghon

7. The Wandering Sheikh Goes South

8. Adventures in India and China

9. Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch

10. Ma Huan and the House of God

11. The King of the African Castle

PART TWO: The Cannons of Christendom

12. Prince Henry’s Far Horizons

13. Commanding the Guinea Coast

14. The Shape of the Indies

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

16. The Spy Who Never Came Home

17. Kings and Gods in the City of Victory

18. Da Gama Enters the Tropical Ocean

19. A First Sight of India

20. The Fateful Pride of Ibn Majid

21. Sounds of Europe’s Rage

22. The Vengeance of da Gama

23. The Viceroy in East Africa

24. Defeating the Ottoman Turks at Diu

25. The Great Afonso de Albuquerque

26. Ventures into the African Interior

27. From Massawa to the Mountains

28. At War with the Left-handed Invader

29. Taking Bible and Sword to Monomotapa

30. Turkish Adventurers, Hungry Cannibals

31. The Renegade Sultan

32. The Lost Pride of Lusitania

33. Calvinists, Colonists and Pirates

34. Ethiopia and the Hopes of Rome

35. The Great Siege of Fort Jesus

36. Western Aims, Eastern Influences

PART THREE: An Enforced Tutelage

37. Settlers on India’s Southern Approaches

38. The Seas beyond Napoleon’s Reach

39. The French Redoubt and the Isle of Slaves

40. ‘Literally a Blank in Geography’

41. Two Ways with the Spoils of War

42. The Sultan and the King’s Navy

43. Stepping Back from East Africa

44. The Americans Discover Zanzibar

45. Looking Westwards from the Raj

46. Portents of Change in the ‘English Lake’

47. In the Footsteps of a Missionary

48. Warriors, Hunters and Traders

49. A Proclamation at the Custom House

50. Meeting the Lords of the Interior

51. The Failure of a Philanthropic Scotsman

52. Imperialism Abhors a Vacuum

53. Bismarck and the Gesellschaft

54. Africa Hears the Maxims of Faith and War

55. From Sultan’s Island to Settlers’ Highlands

Epilogue

Index

Index of Personal Names

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Commentary

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

MAPS

Maps by Leslie Robinson

FOREWORD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A NOTE ON SPELLINGS

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

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

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

PART ONE

ONE
Wonders of India, Treasures of China

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

TWO
Lure of the African Shore

I am being led in Damascus without honour,

as though I am a slave from Zenj.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He did not conceal the way his thoughts were moving:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THREE
The Mystery of the Waqwaqs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FOUR
Islam Rules in the Land of Zanj

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Almost five centuries later, he would be proved right.

FIVE
On the Silk Route to Cathay

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

—Marco Polo, Description of the World (1298)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SIX
A Princess for King Arghon

Gold and silver to fill my storehouse year by year;

Corn and rice to crowd my sheds at every harvest.

Chinese slaves to take charge of treasury and barn.

Foreign slaves to take care of my cattle and sheep.

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

Powerful slaves to till the fields with might and main.

Handsome slaves to play the harp and hand the wine;

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From there he rode to Bordeaux to present gifts to Edward I of England. He had some trouble with the names, recording him as ‘King Ilnagtor in Kersonia’; that is, King of Angleterre in Gascony. But Edward was so gratified by the message borne by his Chinese visitor that he wrote a letter promising to fight in the proposed conflict to extirpate the ‘Mohometan heresy’ for good. Back in Rome in February 1288, Sauma met the newly-elected Pope, Nicholas IV, and ‘wept with joy’ when Nicholas gave him the Eucharist.

In the end, Sauma’s diplomatic efforts were as fruidess as all the rest. Although the Mongols had once believed that the sky-god Tenggeri had chosen them to conquer the entire world, when their enthusiasm for the task waned they turned in upon themselves and retreated to the steppes. The Silk Route was closed to Europeans and the Indian Ocean, with all its bustling commerce, remained even less accessible. The wondrous world the Polos had known once again became little more than a tantalizing legend for the Christians of the West.

SEVEN
The Wandering Sheikh Goes South

The people of Greater India are a little darker in colour than we are, but in Ethiopia they are much darker, and so on until you come to the black negroes, who are at the Equator, which they call the Torrid Zone.

—Nicola de’ Conti, quoted in Travels and Adventures of Pero Tafur, 1435–39

THE YEAR AFTER Marco Polo died, a young Berber lawyer bade farewell to his family and friends in Tangier before setting off on a lifetime of travel. Just as it was claimed for the Venetian merchant in his lifetime that no other man had ‘known or explored so many parts of the world’, so it would be said on Ibn Battuta’s behalf that ‘it must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age’. Both men went to China and India, both sailed across the Indian Ocean, but Ibn Battuta went further, by making two visits to Africa. He probably travelled 75,000 miles to Marco Polo’s 60,000; but the cultural dominance by Christian Europe has bestowed fame upon the Venetian merchant, whereas the rumbustious Moroccan judge has fallen into relative obscurity.

As their lives overlapped, so did their routes in many distant corners of the world. Moreover, they have much in common as narrators. Both enjoy telling outlandish anecdotes, although Marco’s tales often have that typically medieval mixture of farce and earthiness found in Chaucer and Boccaccio, whereas Ibn Battuta, as befits his profession and Muslim piety, is more reserved as a story-teller, while never hiding his enthusiasm for life. The most marked difference is that Ibn Battuta uses the first person singular liberally and keeps himself constantly at the centre of the stage. His narrative is a mixture of travelogue and autobiography.

Although both men exaggerated now and then about the populations of faraway cities, the numbers killed in wars or the riches of foreign potentates (which may be the origin of Marco’s nickname ‘Il Milione’), whenever their memoirs can be checked against independent evidence both turn out to be substantially accurate. On occasion their descriptions of places and customs are so similar that it seems almost beyond coincidence.

Ibn Battuta never reveals whether he had heard of Marco Polo, or if he was conscious of so often following closely in his footsteps. Possibly he did know of him, for Ibn Battuta’s own links with Europe were especially strong, and by the time he was planning his first journey the Polo manuscript had already been translated into several European languages. The Moroccan lawyer had been born into a family of the Berber élite, and Berbers had been settled in Spain for six centuries – ever since 711, when they crossed the narrow straits from Africa in the forefront of the all-conquering Arab armies. The intellectual heart of his world lay in Cordoba, an Islamic but cosmopolitan city with seventeen libraries containing 400,000 books; no other place in western Europe rivalled it as a centre of learning. (Academies in the Christian parts of Spain were dedicated to acquiring from Cordoba and other Andalusian cities the Arab manuscripts containing the great works of Greece and Rome, then translating them into Latin.)

Although a renewed struggle to drive the ‘Moors’ from Spain had deepened the cleavage between opposing religions in the Mediterranean region, differences were often still only of degree, even on such a basic human issue as slavery. While Marco Polo never speaks of owning slaves, apart from granting freedom in his will in 1224 to a man identified as Peter the Tartar, his ‘Serene Republic’ had for centuries thrived on the trade. Venice shipped the captives of European wars to Alexandria, where they were exchanged for the silks and spices of the East. There was also an active slave market in Crete, a Venetian colony, and another in Cyprus selling negroes shipped to Spain from North Africa, then brought along the Mediterranean in galleys.¹

For his part, Ibn Battuta talks freely about the slaves who were always in his entourage, including one or more concubines. While travelling in Turkey, he remarks as an afterthought about a city he had passed through: ‘In this town I bought a Greek slave girl called Marguerite.’ Since she was merely a slave, the reader hears no more of Marguerite; however, Ibn Battuta took care of his slaves, for when a ship he is in starts to sink, his first thoughts are for his two concubines.

Ibn Battuta had left Tangier when he was twenty-one simply to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He wandered at a leisurely pace through Egypt, the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Arabia. While crossing the Mediterranean he travelled in a Genoese ship, and praises the captain for his kindness. His trip to Mecca was extended into a stay of more than two years, which served to enhance his prestige as a qadi, or judge of Islamic shar’ia law; this status, proclaimed by his ceremonial cloak and tall hat, was to make travelling much easier for Ibn Battuta, entitling him to respect and hospitality from Muslim rulers or merchants wherever he chose to stop. It also allowed him to offer himself for the post of qadi whenever he reached a town where a judge had died or the incumbent had fallen into disfavour.²

Until the moment when he decided to visit the Land of Zanj he had travelled mainly on land, and only to places that might not have seemed unduly perilous to a young, educated Muslim with some spirit. By his own testimony, Ibn Battuta found it easy to make friends, but had a weakness for political intrigue; he was generous, yet ambitious, and his public piety was balanced by private indulgence. Most of all he was impetuous, always capable of being swept along by sudden enthusiasms, and his decision to go on a long sea voyage to a remote area of the Indian Ocean revealed the true adventurer in him. Despite being African in a strictly geographical sense, he would have regarded his bustling Tangier birthplace as a world away from Zanj, about which there were many dire rumours. Sometimes it was called Sawahil al-Sudan or just Barr al-’Ajam (Land of the Foreigners).³

His first experience of Africa was certainly discouraging. He crossed from the prosperous port of Aden to a town called Zeila, on the Red Sea side of the Horn. ‘It is a big city and has a great market, but it is the dirtiest, most desolate and smelliest town in the world. The reason for its stink is the quantity of fish, and the blood of the camels they butcher in its alleyways. When we arrived there we preferred to pass the night on the sea, although it was rough.’ An additional reason for Ibn Battuta’s distaste was that the people of Zeila were what he called ‘Rejecters’, since they belonged to a heterodox branch of the Shi’a belief. He was a devout Sunni, his loyalty having been strengthened during his long stay in Mecca. The people of Zeila he dismissively described as ‘negroes’ of the ‘Berberah’. (They were certainly not to be confused with his own Berber people, who were fair-skinned and sometimes had blue eyes.) What he did not say about Zeila was that it served as an assembly-point for prisoners taken in the constant wars against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, lying to the west; they were shipped from Zeila to Aden as slaves.

The dhow in which Ibn Battuta was a passenger quickly set sail again from Zeila, eastwards into the Indian Ocean, then south along the desert coastline to Mogadishu; it was a fifteen-day voyage. For someone of his background, Mogadishu also seemed a fairly brutish place, where killing camels to supply meat for Arabia was one of the main occupations. (As Marco Polo had said, the camel-slaughtering was so great in Mogadishu that it had to be seen to be believed.)

However, this time the young Moroccan was happier to go ashore. One of his companions on board had shouted to the touts who came out to the boat: ‘This man is not a merchant, but a scholar.’ The news was passed to the local judge, who hurried down to the beach to offer a welcome. As Ibn Battuta stepped on to the beach he was warmly embraced by his fellow-qadi, an Egyptian. The salaams acknowledged his status: ‘In the name of God, let us go to greet the sultan.’

The visitor was at once caught up in an elaborate series of rituals, one of which involved being sprinkled with Damascus rosewater by a eunuch. He was then given hospitality in the ‘scholar’s house’ (merchants staying in Arab ports had quarters known as funduqs). It was not until after Friday prayers in the main mosque that Ibn Battuta came face to face with the sultan, who said with traditional courtliness: ‘You are most welcome. You have honoured our country and given us pleasure.’ Ibn Battuta joined in the formal procession from the mosque, and as a mark of respect was allowed, along with the sultan and the qadi, to keep on his sandals. Drums, trumpets and pipes led the way to the audience chamber. There the formal manner of greeting the sultan was like that in the Yemen, by putting an index finger on the ground, then raising it to the head and declaiming, ‘May Allah preserve your power.’

Other ceremonies in Mogadishu were unlike anything Ibn Battuta had yet seen in his travels. As the sultan walked along in fine silken robes topped by an embroidered turban, a coloured canopy was held above him, with a golden statuette of a bird at each corner. It was also surprising to a visitor that men in Mogadishu wore no trousers, but wrapped sarong-like cloths around themselves. (Several social customs mentioned by Ibn Battuta suggest there was a strong Indian or Indonesian influence at work.) But most firmly fixed in Ibn Battuta’s mind, when he came to commit his memories to writing more than twenty years later, was the stupendous amount of food consumed in Mogadishu. He was able to recall the typical meals served up to him three times a day in the scholar’s house: ‘Their food is rice cooked in fat and placed on a large wooden dish’, with dishes of chicken, meat, fish and vegetables placed on top. Then there were further courses of green bananas cooked in milk and pickled chillies, lemons, green ginger and mangoes, all eaten with rice. Ibn Battuta estimated that a whole group of people in Morocco would eat no more at a sitting than any man in Mogadishu: ‘They are extremely corpulent and large-stomached.’

Shortly after leaving the desert country of the Horn the ship crossed the equator: in those times an awesome moment for the superstitious, because unfamiliar constellations began appearing in the night sky. Ibn Battuta did not think it worth mentioning: ‘Then I sailed from the city of Mogadishu, going towards the land of the Sawahil, intending to go to Kilwa, which is one of the cities of the Zanj.’ His ship, its lateen sail billowing before the north-east monsoon, passed a succession of ports founded by the immigrants from Arabia. The names of only a few of these places, such as Mombasa and Malindi, had been heard of in the outside world. About this time there were even rumours in Egypt that Mombasa had been taken over by monkeys, who marched up and down like soldiers. The Swahili coast was not on a route to anywhere else, so scholarly visitors were distinctly rare.

Ibn Battuta’s interest in Kilwa, apart from its pre-eminence on the coast at that time, may have been stirred by his more general curiosity about the African gold trade. In 1324, the year before he passed through Cairo, an African emperor, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, had come there with so much gold that amazement had gripped the Arab world. The ruler was Sulaiman, the Mansa Musa, and he arrived in Egypt with 8,000 warriors, 500 slaves bearing golden staffs, and 100 camels carrying a total of 500,000 ounces of gold. Sulaiman’s profligacy with his wealth depressed the price of gold in Egypt for a decade. It was known that he controlled mines somewhere on the southern side of the Sahara desert, but the extent of Africa was such a mystery, and the dimensions of the world so misconceived, that it was easy to think that gold exported from Zanj came from the same source. (The West African mines were, in fact, an immense distance from Zimbabwe, but that would not become clear for almost two centuries.)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT
Adventures in India and China

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

—Al-Mas’udi, The Meadows of Gold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Islam’s roots were not deep here, the faith having been introduced by a visitor from Persia in 1153; before that the population had followed a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism. Ibn Battuta claims that he tried to disguise his identity on arrival, through a fear that the Maldivian rulers might prove loath to let him leave again, because they lacked a qualified Muslim law-giver. He was quickly recognized none the less: ‘Some busybody had written telling them about me and that I had been qadi in Delhi.’ The suspicion that, in truth, he was only too ready to be asked to offer his services is hard to avoid.

Presents were soon being showered upon him by the Maldivian chief minister and other notables: two new slave-girls, silk robes, a casket of jewels, five sheep and 100,000 cowries. Soon the highly-prized Moroccan finds himself being offered wives from among the rival ruling families, and accepts four, the most a good Muslim can have at any one time. In all, during his eight months in the Maldives he had six different wives. This was entirely in accord with the custom of the islanders: ‘When ships arrive, the crews marry wives, and when they are about to sail they divorce them. It is really a sort of temporary marriage.’

Given little option, Ibn Battuta soon donned his robes as the islands’ chief justice and set about his duties with a will. His interpretation of the shari’a law was much stricter than anything the easy-going islanders had been used to. When he sentenced a thief to have his hand cut off, several people fainted in the courtroom. Anyone who was found to have been absent from Friday prayers was beaten and paraded through the streets. Husbands who kept divorced wives with them until they found new husbands were also beaten. Only one edict by the strict new judge came to nothing: he tried to stop the women walking around bare-breasted, ‘but I could not manage that.’

If Ibn Battuta had set out deliberately to make himself unpopular and stir up rival factions, so easing his departure, then he was successful. The breaking point came when he ordered that an African slave belonging to the sultan should be beaten for adultery; he then publicly rejected the chief minister’s appeal for the order to be rescinded. Even this did not remove all obstacles to his departure, for there was now a suspicion that when he returned to the Indian mainland he might incite potential enemies there to amount an invasion of the islands. (Such fears were justified, for as Ibn Battuta admits – or rather, boasts – he became immersed in intrigue and later came close to mounting just such an attack.) Eventually, he agreed to make a tour of the islands while emotions cooled. Then he went to say farewell to the chief minister: ‘He embraced me, and wept so copiously that his tears dropped on my feet.’

A leisurely voyage through the Maldives gave the embattled qadi time to collect material for the earliest surviving description of the islands. At last he reached an islet where there was only one house, occupied by a weaver:

He had a wife and family, a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and to cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. His island contained also a few banana trees, but we saw no land birds on it except two ravens, which came out to us on our arrival, and circled above our vessel. And I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.

Ibn Battuta eventually slipped away from the Maldives after divorcing all his four current wives (one was pregnant). However, he kept his slaves. His ship sailed off-course and put into harbour in Ceylon, instead of reaching the coast of India. So he took the opportunity to collect facts about the island, noting among other things that the most powerful man in the large town of Kalanbu (Colombo) was a pirate named Jalasti, with a force of 500 Abyssinian mercenaries.

The wandering judge was tempted to Adam’s Peak, a place of pilgrimage for Muslims, Buddhists and Christians alike. At the top was a depression claimed to be the footprint of the first man, and to reach it the pilgrims had to go up a steep stairway with the aid of chains fixed to the rock. Marco Polo had also described Adam’s Peak, but Ibn Battuta’s account of struggling to the mountain-top has infinitely more drama. As he stared down from the peak through the clouds to the vivid greenery of Ceylon he remembered that he had been away from his Moroccan homeland for almost twenty years, but he was still little more than halfway to China, the ultimate goal. There was also a lingering sense of duty towards that self-styled ‘Master of the World’, the mad sultan in distant Delhi.

The route Ibn Battuta took to get to China was typically circuitous. First he made his way up the eastern coastline of India, almost being shipwrecked at one point and risking his life to rescue his slave-girls. He even dared to return to the Maldive islands, contemplating taking away his two-year-old son by the senior wife he divorced there, but soon thought better of it and sailed to Bengal – a ‘gloomy’ country where food was cheap. Next he went to Assam to meet a holy man, then arrived in Sumatra, where he stayed with a Muslim ruler and clearly felt far more at ease than Marco Polo had done during his time in the same land. Finally he landed in the port of Zayton and immediately had the luck to meet one of the Chinese ambassadors who had come to Delhi with presents from the Great Khan.

Although Ibn Battuta strives to convey the idea that he was at once elevated to the status of a visiting ambassador, and was taken in magnificent style to see the Great Khan at Peking, this part of Ibn Battuta’s memoirs lacks the vivacity of the rest. He does admit that he never saw the Mongol ruler, saying that this was because of a rebellion spreading disorder throughout north China. For all that, he is able to give a convincing account of the burial of the deposed monarch with a hundred relatives and confidants, ending with a grisly description of horses being slaughtered and suspended on stakes above the graves.⁶

Ibn Battuta was constantly impressed by the wonders of China, but unlike Marco Polo he did not enjoy life there: ‘Whenever I went out of my house I used to see any number of disagreeable things, and that disturbed me so much that I used to keep indoors and go out only in case of necessity. When I met Muslims in China I always felt as though I was meeting my own faith and kin.’ The nub of his unease lay in being totally outside the Bilad al-Islam, and discovering that ‘heathendom had so strong a hold’ in what was plainly the most powerful country in the world.

An emotional moment came when he met in Fuchow (Fuzhou) a Muslim doctor from Ceuta, the Mediterranean port only a few miles from his Tangier birthplace. At this encounter on the far side of the world they both wept. The doctor had prospered greatly in China: ‘He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave girls, and presented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.’ Some years later Ibn Battuta was to meet the doctor’s brother in West Africa.

Ibn Battuta returned safely by sea from China to Calicut, and there faced a delicate decision. At one moment he felt duty-bound to return to Delhi to report to the sultan all that had happened, then the idea grew too alarming: ‘on second thoughts I had some fears about doing so, so I re-embarked and twenty-eight days later reached Dhofar.’ This was in the familiar territory of Arabia. From there he began making his way home to Tangier by way of Hormuz, Baghdad and Damascus (with a detour for one more pilgrimage to Mecca).

Shortly before he reached Tangier his mother, long a widow, died from the Black Death.⁷ Much had changed in Morocco during the quarter of a century he had been away and little attention was spared for a weatherbeaten qadi whom most people had forgotten. Anxieties were running deep about events across the Strait of Gibraltar, because after almost 700 years Islam was yielding its control, step by step, of southern Spain.

Seemingly at a loss as to what he should do next, Ibn Battuta crossed to the European side of the Mediterranean and joined briefly in the jihad against the advancing Spaniards. His experiences there were far from happy: in one incident, Christian bandits almost took him prisoner near ‘a pretty little town’ called Marbella. He soon returned to the safety of Morocco and decided on one last adventure. He headed southwards across the Sahara desert, along trade routes pioneered by his Berber ancestors in Roman times.

He travelled for another two years (1352–53), covering thousands of miles by camel, donkey and on foot, visiting Mali and other powerful West African kingdoms. It was the region from which the fabulous Mansa Musa had emerged twenty-five years earlier to astound Egypt with his wealth. This part of Africa had been won for Islam, but it was strikingly different from the cities Ibn Battuta had visited two decades before on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. There the rulers were Arabs, controlling an African population but holding firm to a non-African culture. In West Africa the culture was indigenous, and the rulers had adapted Islam to fit their own traditions.

He was astonished by the riches of West Africa, at that time the world’s greatest gold producer, and by the scholarship he found in Timbuktu, on the bend of the Niger river.⁸ He commented: ‘The Negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust and possess a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people … There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or violent men.’

Sadly, his conclusions about the geography of Africa were wildly astray, because he believed that the Niger, flowing eastwards at Timbuktu, later became the Nile, which he had seen flowing northwards in Egypt. (In this error he was following the theory of the twelfth-century writer al-Idrisi, and many other Arab geographers, that there was a ‘western Nile’ flowing from the direction of the Atlantic.) Ibn Battuta may even have thought that the Nile was also joined to the Zambezi. Recalling his experiences in East Africa he said that Sofala was a month’s journey from the gold-producing land of Yufi. When he came to describe what he believed to be the course of the Nile he declared: ‘It continues from Muli to Yufi, one of the greatest countries of the black people, whose ruler is the most considerable of kings of the whole region.’

He went on: ‘Yufi cannot be visited by any white man, because they would kill him before he got there.’ Since Ibn Battuta regarded himself as ‘white’ in both colour and culture this was simply a way of explaining why he had failed to make a trip to see the gold-mines, the subject of so much speculation.

When Ibn Battuta finally returned from West Africa to Fez, the Moroccan capital, he was able to claim that he had visited every region of the world where Muslims either ruled or had settled. Many people in the court insisted that it was impossible for one man to have travelled so far and survived so many dangers. These arguments were silenced by the sultan’s chief minister, who gave Ibn Battuta several scribes to whom he could dictate as he pleased, as well as a young court secretary, Muhammad ibn Juzayy. It was Ibn Juzayy, proud of his own modest journeys abroad, who wrote in admiration of his elderly charge: ‘It must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age.’

The old adventurer took his time, living near the palace, sifting through his memories and dictating to the scribes. These labours seem to have been stretched out over almost three years. At times he faltered in remembering the names of people and places, but could still recall vividly those parts of India where the women were especially beautiful and ‘famous for their charms in intercourse’. Ibn Battuta was eventually despatched to be the law-giver in an unidentified Moroccan town. No more is on record about him, except that he is thought to have died in 1377 in the ancient city of Marrakesh, aged seventy-three.

By that time a momentous change had overtaken those distant lands through which he and Marco Polo had travelled. The Great Khan was no more, for Mongol rule in China had ended as swiftly as it began. The people whose mounted armies had swept irresistibly across Asia and much of Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century now vanished from the world stage. The Ming dynasty had taken power in the ‘Central Country’ and would hold it for the next 300 years.

NINE
Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch

Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.

—Chinese envoy, addressing the Sultan of Aden, 1420

THE DRIVING FORCE behind China’s most dramatic display of sea-power in its history was a singular figure, the Grand Admiral Zheng He. Described by contemporaries as handsome, tall and burly, with fierce eyes, long earlobes, and a voice ‘as loud as a bell’, Zheng was also a eunuch. They called him the Three-Jewel Eunuch (or, more formally, the Eunuch of the Three Treasures, a title derived from Buddhism which is literally translated as ‘the Three Jewels of Pious Ejaculation’). Yet he was not a Buddhist, his original surname was not Zheng, and ethnically he was not of Chinese descent.

He was born in 1371 in the south-western Kunyang county, in the province of Yunnan. Kunyang is remote from the sea, but his family is thought to have originated even further away, beyond the Great Wall in a distant part of central Asia, and to have come to Yunnan with the Mongols. At all events, they were Muslims, both his father and grandfather having made pilgrimages to Mecca – a great achievement at that time. The family name was Ma, a common one among Muslims in China, and the boy had an elder brother and four sisters. When he was born the Mongols were still holding Yunnan, but were finally driven out by the armies of the Ming emperor Hongwu in 1382.

This was to be the turning-point in the life of the Ma family’s eleven-year-old son. A visiting general chose him, for his looks and his intelligence, to be taken to Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Once in Nanjing, he was made a page to the prince of Yan, the future emperor Yongle. He was given the new surname of Zheng, and castrated.

The creation of eunuchs to be the personal attendants of China’s rulers was a tradition, dating back to the earliest empires. At first only criminals were castrated, and were then sent to serve in the palace; this was called gongxing, palace punishment. Gradually the stigma was removed. Eunuchs were found to be unwaveringly loyal, never liable to suspicion of plotting to found dynasties of their own; all their energies were dedicated to whatever tasks were set for them. The most obvious role for a eunuch of a menial type was as ‘guardians of the harem’. Sometimes courtiers and confidants of much higher status chose to be castrated, to rule out any danger of being accused of sexual misconduct.

The Yongle period was the heyday of the eunuchs, who had played a decisive role in the intrigues which helped the emperor to seize the throne in 1403. They came to have far more say in palace circles than the traditional wielders of power, the Confucian bureaucrats, and none was more influential than Zheng He. While still in his mid-thirties he became a senior officer in the army garrison at Nanjing, on the Yangtze river, after putting down a rebellion in his home province.

When the new emperor decided to implement the long-discussed plans for a naval venture into the Indian Ocean, he turned to Zheng whose religion made him a natural choice since so many of the ‘barbarian’ lands round the ocean were reputed to follow the rites of the ‘Heavenly Square’ (the Ka’ba in Mecca). There had been a pretence at first that Zheng He was merely being sent to look for Huidi, the deposed emperor, but this was soon abandoned. The Chinese were primarily looking for markets for the surpluses of their great factories.¹

There is no knowing whether Zheng was ever a naval commander before being appointed to lead the first expedition. Perhaps he had seen action in sea fights with Japanese pirates (wokou), who wreaked havoc among Chinese merchant shipping; the junks of the coastal defence fleet carried warriors trained to board the pirate ships and slaughter their crews. Even if Zheng was no seafarer he must have been well acquainted with naval activity, since Nanjing was near the ocean. Stupendous efforts had been made there for several decades to build up China’s fleets.

A previous emperor, Taizu, had ordered the planting on mountainsides inland from Nanjing of millions of trees, to provide wood suitable for ships. By the time of Yongle, the imperial navy consisted of 400 vessels stationed at Nanjing, 2,800 coastal-defence ships, a 3,000-strong transport fleet, and 250 ‘treasure ships’, showpieces of Chinese technology. Although the Mongol rulers had been able to assemble 4,400 ships for a failed attack on Japan a century earlier, and 1,000 for a punitive expedition to Java, most of these would have looked puny alongside the vessels now put at the disposal of the ‘Three-Jewel Eunuch’.

Armed with the emperor’s edict, Zheng prepared the first of his seven expeditions with a bravura that was to be characteristic of his entire career. The fleet assembled at Dragon River Pass (Liujiajiang) near the mouth of the Yangtze in 1405; this was to be the pattern for the next quarter of a century. The stately ‘treasure ships’, each weighing more than 500 tons, borne along by the wind in their twelve sails, and carrying hundreds of men, had names such as Pure Harmony, Lasting Tranquillity and Peaceful Crossing.² Under full sail they were likened to ‘swimming dragons’. These were the floating fortresses of the fleet, their crews armed with ‘fire arrows’ charged with gunpowder, as well as rockets and blunderbusses firing stones. By 1350 the Chinese had also invented bombards, known as ‘wonder-working long-range awe-inspiring cannon’, although these were not highly valued for naval use.

The number of big junks sailing in each of the expeditions varied from about forty to more than a hundred, and each had several support vessels. These armadas of the Xia Xiyang (‘Going Down to the Western Ocean’) were the wonders of the age. The ships carried doctors, accountants, interpreters, scholars, holy men, astrologers, traders and artisans of every sort: on most of his seven expeditions Zheng had as many as 30,000 men under his command, in up to 300 ships of varying types. Flags, drums and lanterns were used to send messages within the fleet. To work out positions and routes the heavens were studied with the use of calibrated ‘star plates’, carved in ebony.

As with all convoys, the slowest vessels dictated the speed, and this was often no more than fifty miles a day, despite the use of huge oars when winds were slack.³ Enough rice and other foodstuffs to last for a year were in the holds, lest provisions were lacking in the barbarian lands. Fresh water was stored in large tanks deep in the hulls. As a matter of pride, the Chinese never cared to feel at a disadvantage in foreign parts.

At first the Three-Jewel Eunuch ventured no further than Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India, sending his huge fleets into such ports as Calicut and Quilon, with which Chinese merchants had been familiar for a century. By this time the South Indian pepper port of Calicut (called Kuli by the Chinese) was recognized as the most important emporium in the ‘Western Ocean’; when Calicut’s emissaries went to Nanjing in 1405 its ruler, the Zamorin, was rewarded with an elevated Chinese title. The attention Zheng’s fleets paid to this thriving city proves the commercial purpose behind his expeditions.

There were also less mundane reasons for visiting local rulers. In 1409 the Chinese invaded Ceylon, penetrated the country as far as the mountain capital of Kandy, and captured the Sinhalese king, Vira Alakesvara, together with his queen and members of the court. This was a direct punishment for the king’s refusal, several years before, to hand over to the Chinese emperor a precious relic, the tooth of the Buddha. In his time the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan had also tried to acquire the tooth, but in vain. The king and the other captives were taken back to China as hostages and kept there for five years (although Zheng never did manage to lay hands on the holy tooth). As a reminder of this violent interlude the expedition left behind at the port of Galle a tablet inscribed in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, respectively praising Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.

News of this hostage-taking must soon have spread along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that other rulers would be suitably submissive and hand over tribute, thus in effect conceding that they recognized the Chinese emperor as supreme ruler of the universe. When dealing with foreigners, the envoys from Beijing sometimes failed to hide the superiority they felt. One who went ashore in Aden could not bring himself to kiss the ground, as was customary, at the start of his audience with the sultan. This was taken by the Arabs as an insult; for their part, the Chinese thought the people of Aden ‘overbearing’.

However, the rewards were great for foreign monarchs willing to pay tribute to the emperor and acknowledge him as their ultimate overlord and mentor. They would be invited to send emissaries to China aboard one of the great treasure ships; in due course the emissaries would return with gifts more valuable than any they had taken with them, to press home the fact of Chinese superiority. An imperial edict explained: ‘They come here out of respect for our civilizing ways.’ The gifts they brought with them were seen as tribute, a proof of submission.

Yet if this was imperialism, it was of a curiously impermanent nature. Although Zheng sometimes sent punitive parties ashore – one was landed at Mogadishu in Somalia to teach its truculent sultan a lesson – he never installed a permanent garrison anywhere.⁴ When each expedition was finished, the entire fleet would turn away eastwards, sail back through the straits of Malacca, head north through the more familiar waters of East Asia, and finally drop anchor in the home port of Nanjing.

The treasure ships carrying the envoys from the Indian Ocean lands were known as ‘Star Rafts’, a term used by a certain Fei Xin in the title of his account of one expedition: Triumphant Sights from the Star Raft. This in turn came from an ancient belief, dating back at least twelve centuries, that if a ship sailed far enough it would eventually leave the earth, reach the Milky Way and come to a galactic city wherein sat a maiden spinning (the traditional representation of Vega in the Lyra constellation). Such heavenly images are mirrored in the wording on a column at Dragon River Pass commemorating Zheng’s expeditions: ‘Our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds, day and night continued their course, rapid like that of a star, traversing the savage waves.’

Although Zheng was a devout Muslim, he saw no inconsistency in erecting a column in a temple dedicated to the Taoist goddess Tianfei (the Celestial Spouse). The inscription boasts that countries ‘beyond the horizon and at the ends of the earth have all become subjects’, and goes on to thank the Celestial Spouse for her protection. The miraculous and majestic powers of the goddess ‘whose virtuous achievements have been recorded in a most honourable manner in the Bureau of Sacrificial Worship’ quelled hurricanes and saved the fleets from disaster. Her presence was revealed in times of extreme peril by a light shining at the masthead.

This inscription at Dragon Pass River also reveals how total were the powers vested in the eunuch ‘aristocracy’. The tribute to the Celestial Spouse was in the names of Grand Eunuchs Zheng He and Wang Jinghong, the assistant envoys, the Grand Eunuchs Zhu Liang, Zhou Fu, Hong Bao and Yang Zhen, and the Senior Lesser Eunuch Zhang Da. Probably all of Zheng’s senior captains were eunuchs.

The fourth expedition, launched by an imperial edict in December 1412, extended Zheng’s sphere of influence westwards beyond India, to Arabia and Africa. The commander himself only went as far as Hormuz and the Persian Gulf, but another part of his fleet was detached near Sumatra and sailed straight across the Indian Ocean to East Africa (the route taken centuries before by the Waqwaqs).

Despite some misconceptions and prejudices, the Chinese clearly knew, even before Zheng’s expeditions, far more about Africa than did their European contemporaries. Most remarkable are two maps surviving in Chinese archives. These accurately portray the triangular shape of the African continent, sharply pointed at the southern tip. One is dated 1320 and the other 1402, a time when China still regarded itself as the ‘Central Country’ in a single landmass, of which Africa was one extension. Both maps show rivers flowing northwards through Africa, and one has a great lake in the heart of the continent. At the time when they were drawn, Europe was still totally ignorant about the overall shape of Africa.⁵

Zheng’s purpose in reaching out for the first time as far as the Red Sea and the Zanj coast was largely so that Chinese merchants could make their first direct contact with these remote markets. Through intermediaries they had been buying the products of Africa for many centuries, and as early as the eleventh century the first envoys from East Africa had appeared in China. They were described as coming from Cengtan (Zangdan; that is, the Land of Zanj) and because it was such a great distance they were rewarded by the Song emperor with especially opulent gifts in return for their tribute. It had been thought worthy of note that these ‘barbarians’ were casting their own coins, which indeed was just starting to happen, and the language of Zanj (early Swahili) was described as ‘sounding like that of the Arabs’. The despatch of envoys from East Africa at that early date is less surprising than might at first appear: its ivory, ambergris and rhinoceros horn had reached China through Oman, which had itself sent a series of trade missions to the Sahib al-Sîn.

In the late twelfth century the author Zhou Qufei had written about the slave trade centred in the offshore islands of East Africa, which he called Cenggi Kunlun (Land of the Blacks). By the early thirteenth century a senior trade official, Zhao Rugua, had been able to put together a fairly detailed account of East Africa’s imports, saying that many ships went there from India and Arabia, carrying white and red cotton cloth, porcelain and copper, probably in the form of cooking-pots, lamps and ornaments.

The East African town with which the Chinese were to have most contact was Malindi, which Arab chroniclers had called the ‘capital of the Land of Zanj’, renowned for its wizards. (Ibn Battuta never mentioned Malindi, perhaps because it inclined towards religious practices, derived from strong links with Persia, of which he could not approve.)

This port on the Zanj mainland was well placed to take advantage of trading opportunities in the Indian Ocean, being only a few days’ sailing below the equator and less than a month’s voyage across the sea from Calicut. In an age when open-sea navigation relied mainly on latitudes estimated by the stars, a ship going to Africa from Calicut could stay on the latitude of 10°N, make its landfall near the tip of Somalia, then follow the coastline south-west to Malindi, the first major Zanj entrepôt. Otherwise it could sail south to the equator, then turn due west and head for the African shore, to reach Malindi at 3°S.

The rise of Malindi had mirrored the growth of Calicut. Now it was to become renowned as the source of wondrous auguries, brought to the emperor of China in the treasure ships of the Three-Jewel Eunuch.

TEN
Ma Huan and the House of God

You must know that the giraffe is short in the body and slopes down towards the rear, because its hind legs are short … It has a small head and does no harm to anyone. Its colour is dappled red and white. And a very pretty sight it is.

—Marco Polo, Description of the World (1298)

ON 20 SEPTEMBER 1414, the first giraffe ever seen in China trod delicately along the road leading to the palace in Beijing. It was a gift from the sultan of Bengal, Saif-ud-Din, who in turn had been given it by the sultan of Malindi. At the outset the response of the emperor Yongle was cool. ‘Let congratulations be omitted,’ he replied, as courtiers vied to assure him that this long-awaited vision was proof of imperial virtue and wisdom. Good government depended upon peace, said the emperor, not upon the appearance of an animal which was being hailed as the magical qilin. His ministers should simply work harder ‘for the welfare of the world’. In any case, the emperor knew, and even his most sycophantic courtiers knew, that this was nothing like a qilin, that legendary, single-horned animal with the ‘body of a deer and the tail of an ox’, the Chinese equivalent of the unicorn.

The giraffe was just the most extraordinary of all the creatures being sent at this time to Beijing from distant barbarian countries. Chinese official records soberly called it a zulafu, which was as close as they could come to the Arabic word zarafa, but exotic animals like these had fascinated China from the earliest times. During the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C. to A.D. 24) there had been a vast imperial park, with a perimeter of 130 miles, full of zoological and botanical rarities. The animal-loving mother of one of the Han emperors had been buried with a rhinoceros, a giant panda and other creatures. Envoys going to distant lands were always enjoined to bring back unfamiliar species, and many old geographical works by Chinese scholars contain sections in which real and mythical beasts are jumbled together.¹

Although the mythical qilin had been written about for 4,000 years – some accounts saying it had blue eyes and red-tipped horns with magic qualities – a realistic description of the giraffe had been lacking until the foreign trade official Zhao Rugua gave a hearsay account. This was undoubtedly garnered from Arab merchants: ‘There is also in this country [the Horn of Africa] a wild animal called zula; it resembles a camel in shape, an ox in size, and is of a yellow colour. Its forelegs are five feet long, its hind legs only three feet. Its head is high up and turned upwards.’ Zhao Rugua also noted that the giraffe’s skin was very thick, which is true; it is often used for making whips.

Public delight with the first African giraffe ever seen in China was to prove stronger than the imperial desire to belittle it as a portent. Although, in these early years of the Ming dynasty, there was a widespread interest in natural science – the emperor’s own brother had written a serious work on botany – the people had long awaited a qilin, and the giraffe seemed as near to one as the animal kingdom was likely to provide. A member of the Imperial Academy called Shen Du caught the mood with his poem, which was prefaced by a flowery dedication to the emperor: ‘I, Your Servant, joining the throng, behold respectfully this omen of good fortune and kneeling down a hundred times and knocking my head on the ground I present a hymn of praise as follows.’ Amid a welter of rhetoric comes Shen Du’s highly fanciful description of the giraffe:

In a corner of the western seas, in the stagnant waters of a great morass,

Truly was produced a qilin whose shape was fifteen feet high,

With the body of a deer and the tail of an ox, and a fleshy boneless horn,

With luminous spots like a red cloud or a purple mist,

Its hoofs do not tread on living creatures.

This apparent harmlessness (although its hind legs do possess a lethal kick) was the characteristic the giraffe most visibly shared with that mythical unicorn.² The admiring crowds had no fear as this latest gift from foreign lands walked through Beijing with its curious, camel-like stride. Its head, far above the admiring crowd, turned constantly from side to side as it sniffed the autumn air. In the words of Shen Du: ‘Ministers and people gathering to behold it vie in being the first to see the joyful spectacle.’ Another courtier wrote in a similar vein: ‘Its two eyes rove incessantly. All are delighted with it.’ The creature was strange in so many ways: despite having a tongue nearly as long as a man’s arm, it could not utter the faintest sound. A Chinese painting survives in which the animal is being led on a rein by the Bengali keeper who has accompanied it across the seas; he looks up devotedly at his charge.³

So when yet another tame giraffe appeared, directly from Malindi, in the following year – the precise date, 10 October 1415, can be calculated from Chinese records – the emperor had to yield to the enthusiasm of the populace. He went himself to welcome it. Two other most auspicious creatures were being led towards him behind the chestnut-coloured giraffe: a ‘celestial horse’, a zebra, and a ‘celestial stag’, an oryx. This time the emperor’s pronouncement was less dismissive, but suitably modest. He attributed this symbol of harmony and peace to ‘the abundant virtue of the late emperor, my father’, enhanced by the support of his own ministers. From now on, it would be his duty to hold ever more resolutely to virtue, and the duty of his ministers to remind him of any shortcomings.

A certain testiness can be discerned in the emperor’s comments on the excitement aroused by Malindi’s giraffes. After all, the transporting of gifts was only incidental to the intensely serious business of the great expeditions. The giraffes are not even mentioned by Ma Huan, a chronicler who went with Zheng He on several voyages. Ma Huan was intent on describing the countries he visited, and without his book, Yingyai Shenglan (Triumphant Visions of the Ocean’s Shores,, the reputation of his master would rest only upon fragmentary writings.

Ma Huan was also a Muslim, his surname being the same as the one Zheng had originally possessed, although he is not known to have been a eunuch. He was recruited at a time when Zheng was coming to realize that the further he sailed the harder it would be to understand the languages of the barbarian envoys brought back to the imperial court. (Sometimes it was proving necessary to resort to ‘double translation’, in which the envoys’ messages were relayed through two interpreters before a Chinese version could be conveyed to the emperor.) Zheng had already set up a foreign languages school in Nanjing, and Ma Huan was one of a corps of seagoing interpreters whose first duty was to be in attendance when audiences were held with foreign monarchs. The interpreters would also help the Chinese merchants accompanying Zheng’s fleets.

In personal references in his book, Ma is self-deprecatory in the typical Chinese style of the time. He calls himself a ‘simpleton’ and a ‘mountain-woodcutter’, for whom the expeditions were ‘a wonderful opportunity, happening once in a thousand years’. Nevertheless, Ma was well educated, with a mastery of written and spoken Arabic. His book begins with a laudatory poem, with these opening lines:

The Emperor’s glorious envoy received the divine commands,

‘Proclaim abroad the silken sounds, and go to the barbarous lands’.

His giant ship on the roaring waves of the boundless ocean rode,

Afar, o’er the rolling billows vast and limitless, it strode.

The poem goes on to list some of the twenty countries he saw on the expeditions, and declares that the foreign peoples were ‘grateful, admiring our virtue, showing themselves loyal and sincere’. He says proudly that merchants from the ‘Central Glorious Country’ were now travelling as far as Misr (Egypt).

Measured by the information his book gives on social customs, trade and current affairs, Ma is on a par with Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Since less than a century separates them, it is especially rewarding to set Ma’s accounts of the Indian Ocean alongside those of Ibn Battuta. For example, both exerted their descriptive talents in praising Calicut and its people.

By the time Ma came to Calicut in 1414, the port had grown to become a city-state, and with some hyperbole he called it ‘the great country of the Western Ocean’. Almost a tenth of his entire book is devoted to Calicut, which the grand eunuchs leading the expeditionary fleets used as the pivot of their operations. One reason for Ma’s praise for Calicut (apart from an eagerness to mirror the judgement of his superiors) was the strong Islamic leanings of a town which had more than twenty mosques and a settled Muslim population of 30,000. Everywhere in its streets Arabic could be heard. To a young Chinese Muslim, one of whose main goals in life was to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, Calicut’s atmosphere must have been exhilarating. Arabia was just across the ocean, no more than a fortnight’s voyage away with a fair wind.

It may have been a desire to please Chinese readers that led Ma to assert that the Zamorin, the Sea-King of Calicut, was a Buddhist. In fact he was a Hindu. But the ‘great chiefs’ who advised the ruler were all Muslims, and the two most senior had been given high awards by Zheng He on the emperor’s orders. The envoys of Calicut were granted precedence over all others when they went to China to present tribute. Ma applies a string of laudatory epithets to the people of the city: honest, trustworthy, smart, fine and distinguished. He gives a detailed picture of the way trade was conducted between the representatives from a Chinese ‘treasure ship’, bringing ashore their silks, porcelains and other goods, and the local merchants and brokers. It was a slow process, taking up to three months, for prices had to be agreed separately, but eventually all parties would clasp hands and swear that the settlement would never be repudiated. The presence of ‘His Excellency the Eunuch’ at the hand-clasping ceremony confirms the importance attached to trade on the expeditions, notwithstanding all the grandiose rhetoric about their civilizing role.

It intrigued Ma – he calls it ‘very extraordinary’ – that the merchants of Calicut did not use an abacus in the Chinese fashion when making calculations: ‘They use only their hands and feet and the twenty digits on them, and they do not make the slightest mistake.’

He goes into detail about the vegetables grown in Calicut, about which animals are bred for food, the varieties of rice planted and the imports of wheat. He notes that the wealthy people invest in coconut plantations, some growing as many as 3,000 trees; the numerous uses of the coconuts and the trees themselves are carefully listed. The cultivation of pepper on hillside farms, the time of year when it is picked and dried, the prices paid and duties levied by the king; all these are recorded. Ma even gives an account of Indian music, conceding that ‘the melodies are worth hearing’.

He ends his portrayal of Calicut with a graphic account of a gruesome ‘boiling oil’ method used to test the innocence or guilt of miscreants. A cooking pot of oil is heated until leaves thrown into it shrivel up with a crackling noise.

Then they make the man take two fingers of his right hand and scald them in the oil for a short time; he waits until they are burnt then takes them out; they are wrapped in a cloth on which a seal is affixed; he is kept in prison at the office. Two or three days later, before the assembled crowd, they break open the seal and examine him; if the hand has a burst abscess, then there is nothing unjust about the matter and the punishment is imposed; if the hand is undamaged, just as it had been before, then he is released.

Although Ma’s chapter on Calicut stands out from the rest of his book, wherever he goes the oddities of life capture his attention. At times he can be as earthy as Marco Polo in describing social customs, notably in his account of the popular Thai manner of enhancing masculine charms:

When a man has attained his twentieth year they take the skin which surrounds the penis and with a fine knife shaped like the skin of an onion they open it up and insert a dozen tin beads inside the skin; then they close it up and protect it with medicinal herbs. The man waits until the opening of the wound is healed, then he goes out and walks about. The beads look like a cluster of grapes. There is indeed a class of men who arrange this operation; they specialize in inserting and soldering these beads for people; they do it as a profession. If it is the king of the country or a great chief or a wealthy man who has the operation, then they use gold to make hollow beads, inside which a grain of sand is placed, and they are inserted in the penis; when the man walks about they make a tinkling sound, and this is regarded as beautiful. The men who have no beads inserted are people of the lower classes.

He ends blandly: ‘This is a most curious thing.’

Sometimes his anecdotes closely echo those of Marco Polo: ‘If a married woman is very intimate with one of our men from the Central Country [China], wine and food are provided, and they drink and sit and sleep together. The husband is quite calm and takes no exception to it; indeed, he says, “My wife is beautiful and the man from the Central Country is delighted with her.”’

When Ma comes finally to conduct his readers through Arabia and Mecca, all such hints of raciness are absent. It was not merely that as a Muslim he was filled with a sense of reverence for the holy places of his religion, but also that two decades had passed since he first went to sea with one of the great Indian Ocean fleets; he was now in his fifties, accompanying the last of Zheng’s expeditions. Ma must have been surprised that the Three–Jewel Eunuch had won consent, after a gap of ten years, to mount another huge and costly venture to distant lands, because the death of the Yongle emperor in 1424 had seemed to mark the end of an era.

The coterie of predominantly Muslim eunuchs round the emperor had now been challenged by a rival élite, the Confucian civil servants. For six of the intervening years Zheng had been posted as garrison commander at Nanjing, watching his great treasure ships swing idly at their moorings in the Yangtze river. There were signs that the court of the Xuande emperor had turned its back on the idea of asserting a permanent mastery over a vast and dangerous ocean which nowhere touched China’s own borders.

Somehow, however, Zheng managed to override this indifference, and in January 1431 his final voyage began. Many of the veterans of former expeditions were among the 27,550 men under his command; others were performing compulsory service, in obedience to the laws of the Ming era, to expiate crimes committed by their fathers or grandfathers. Calicut was once again the base for the main fleet, and detachments were sent off to various countries. Ma Huan probably went to Arabia as the interpreter for a group of Chinese who took musk and porcelain as their trade goods and returned with sundry ‘unusual commodities’, as well as ostriches, lions and yet another giraffe; such animals were easily transported across the Red Sea from Ethiopia.

As might be expected, Ma offers no criticism of life in Arabia: ‘The customs of the people are pacific and admirable. There are no poverty-stricken families. They all observe the precepts of their religion and law-breakers are few. It is in truth a most happy country.’ When he describes the Ka’ba (House of God), there are many similarities to an account Ibn Battuta had given a century earlier. Ma even goes to the trouble of listing the number of openings (466) in the wall around the Ka’ba, and the exact number of jade pillars on each section of the wall. Although generally accurate, he makes some curious mistakes, saying that Medina, the site of Muhammad’s tomb, was a day’s journey west of Mecca, whereas it was ten days’ distance to the north. He goes on to describe the holy Well of Zamzam as being beside Muhammad’s grave, whereas it is in the centre of Mecca. This must arouse the suspicion that although he certainly went to Arabia he never reached Mecca itself, perhaps because of fighting near the southern end of the Red Sea.

It was a time when Aden was challenging the Mamluke monarchs of Egypt for control of western Arabia, including Mecca and Medina. The instability this caused is shown by the predicament of two large junks, loaded with trade goods, when they reached Aden in June 1432. Their captains wrote letters to the sharifin Mecca and the port controller in Jeddah, seeking permission to sail up the Red Sea. These officials in turn sought the approval of the ruler in Cairo, al-Malik al-Ashraf Barsbay, who said that the junks should be ‘welcomed with honour’. It is not recorded that the ships ever did reach Jeddah; it may have been this disorder which forced Ma in the end to rely upon hearsay about Mecca and Medina.

In March 1433, as the great fleet was reassembling to return to China, the Three-Jewel Eunuch died in Calicut. His body was carried home in one of the treasure ships, to be buried in Nanjing; as was the custom with Chinese eunuchs, his genitals – kept in a sealed jar since his castration – were buried with him, so that he could go complete into the afterlife.

Never again would the great fleets make their majestic progress across the Indian Ocean. Only memories lingered: according to an Arab ambassador who visited India in 1441, the ‘adventurous sailors of Calicut’ liked to call themselves Tchinibetchegan (Sons of the Chinese); by the end of the fifteenth century there were only confused legends of men with strange beards who had arrived in huge ships and came ashore carrying their weapons.

Despite all the imperial honours bestowed upon Zheng He, his lifelong efforts to forge permanent bonds with the lands of the Indian Ocean had come to nothing. China retreated into itself, once more indifferent to the world beyond the straits of Malacca.⁴ After his death the silken screens of Confucian authority closed around his reputation, and the ‘Star Raft’ records were destroyed. When another influential eunuch, hoping to organize a seaborne attack on Annam, asked to see them, he was told they could not be found. Only at the end of the sixteenth century, 160 years after Zheng’s death, did the author Luo Maodeng try to restore his fame with a 1,000-page novel called The Western Sea Cruises of the Eunuch San Bao (San Bao means Three Jewels). It contained a portrait of the grand admiral, seated aboard his flagship, his features awesome. But the book made little impact, for the civil servants had done their work well, and China’s greatest naval commander was consigned to oblivion. As for Ma Huan, he finally managed to have his book printed in 1451, when he was in his eighties; although he had spent his later life lecturing about his travels, his name was soon forgotten.

Viewed in historical perspective, Zheng’s seven expeditions seem a perplexing, almost irrational, phenomenon. The Indian Ocean in the fifteenth century was a trading arena of great wealth (no other region of the world had a comparable output of manufactured goods and raw materials); into this arena the Chinese intrusion had been sudden, massive and forceful. Yet just as suddenly it ended, leaving scarcely a trace behind. Indeed, there is only one known piece of tangible evidence throughout the whole of the Indian Ocean to prove that Zheng was ever there with his vast armadas and tens of thousands of men: that is the trilingual tablet set up in Ceylon in 1410.⁵

The rest of the tantalizing evidence survives in China, and apart from narratives such as Ma Huan’s book and the temple pillars there is a nautical chart more than five metres long. This was compiled during the expeditions and names more than 250 places in the Indian Ocean, from Malacca to Mozambique. Although known as the Mao Kun map, it is not a map in the normal sense, but lists ports, landmarks, bays, havens and dangerous rocks along a course drawn from right to left. There is no scale, and the space devoted to various regions varies according to the data available; thus China has three times as much as Arabia and East Africa combined. The correct routes are carefully defined, giving currents, prevailing winds and depth soundings. By means of compass bearings and the positions at precise times of sun and guiding stars (jian xing fa) the compilers were able to show with astonishing accuracy the sea lanes of the fifteenth century.

The map was probably assembled from the records of Zheng’s commanders.⁶ However, there is no way of knowing from it exactly where all the flotillas sailed, or how many of them never returned. There are hints that some may have swept in a great arc through the southern seas, looking in vain for land, and that others could have followed the African coastline past Sofala. The Mao Kun map says that storms stopped fleets going beyond ‘Habuer’, which appears to be a small island south of Africa.

Momentarily, the cloak of Chinese power was spread across the world, almost touching the borders of Europe. The merchants who went as far as Cairo stimulated the demand in Europe for oriental silks and porcelains. In China itself a cosmopolitan atmosphere was created as crowds of envoys from remote countries were brought back in the treasure ships. Processions of men speaking unknown languages and wearing strange costumes were seen in the streets of Nanjing and Beijing. They brought jewels, pearls, gold and ivory, and scores of animals. The keepers of the imperial zoological gardens were much occupied with the unfamiliar tribute being offered to the Sacred Emperor.

The place to ponder on the forgotten achievements of Zheng He is Dondra in Ceylon; it is the southernmost point of the Indian subcontinent. Close by the headland is a rocky beach, where the crumbling graves of shipwrecked mariners are shaded by coconut palms. Once Dondra had a great temple for a recumbent Buddha made entirely of gold, with two great rubies as eyes, and every night 500 maidens sang and danced before it. A short distance to the west is where Zheng’s tablet in three languages was set up. When the Chinese fleets, sailing west, sighted the gilded temple roof at Dondra Head they knew it soon would be time to turn north, towards Calicut and the Arabian Sea.

From here the Indian Ocean stretches away southwards, beyond countless horizons, to the bottom of the world. South-east lies the route back to Sumatra and China; far to the south-west is Madagascar. Beyond that is the cape where Africa makes its sudden turn into a more hostile ocean, so long unconquered by ships from either East or West.

ELEVEN
The King of the African Castle

Mombaza, Quiloa and Melind,

And Sofala (thought Ophir) to the realm

Of Congo and Angola farthest south.

—John Milton, Paradise Lost, Book II

IF THE REST OF AFRICA can put forward any rivals to the pyramids of Egypt in monumental building, Great Zimbabwe must rank high among them. The grey granite outlines of this African capital, 1,200 miles south of the equator, are strewn on the edge of the high plateau between the Zambezi and Limpopo rivers; the names of the men who ruled here, 700 years ago, are long forgotten. (So is the original name of the place itself. Zimbabwe comes from the title given it by later inhabitants of the region: dzimbahwe, house of stone.) Yet even in a state of ruin, when first sighted by European colonizers in the nineteenth century, the place was so impressive that credit for its construction was given to Phoenicians, Egyptians, Indians, anyone but Africans.¹ This revived the ancient legend that the gold-producing regions of southern Africa were Ophir, the destination of King Solomon’s ships.

Gold had certainly been a stimulus in the surge of activity which created Zimbabwe.² The Indian Ocean port of Sofala was reached by a twenty-day journey, down from the plateau and due east across the coastal lowlands. At the coast the merchants waited with Syrian glassware, Persian and Chinese bowls, beads, cowrie shells, spoons and bells.³ The dhows, arriving on the monsoon, also brought cargoes of bright-coloured cloth, known as kambaya, from the great Indian port of Cambay. For centuries such goods had been an irresistible lure for the people of the interior.

Great Zimbabwe was occupied continuously for 400 years, and during much of this time it controlled the gold trade with Sofala. The rulers grew rich. They wore garments of imported silk (traditionally, coloured blue and yellow), but also had long capes of stiff cloth, woven locally from cotton grown in the Zambezi valley. When they gave judgement in disputes they sat on carved, three-legged stools, and were often hidden, speaking from behind a curtain. Gongs were sounded to announce their arrival, and petitioners had to crawl forwards on the ground, clapping their hands as they spoke, and never looking at the king. It was expected of a ruler, because of his divine powers, to keep a vast number of wives – perhaps as many as 300. He was also the custodian of all the nation’s herds, and ordinary people had use of the cattle as an act of royal patronage. Animals were slaughtered on the orders of the king to meet the needs of his subjects.

Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Great Zimbabwe was the most powerful capital in southern Africa, but there were dozens more stone-built settlements on the eastern side of the plateau, from which cattle were taken down to the lowlands to graze. Near the Limpopo river the earlier dzimbahwe of Mapungubwe was surrounded by terraced farmland, its rulers ate off celadon dishes from China, and relics found in graves include a sculpture of a rhinoceros, six inches long, completely sheathed in gold leaf. Only in Great Zimbabwe’s maturity did its rulers develop a similar interest in making ornaments out of the metal, rather than simply selling it as dust or nuggets.

What distinguished Great Zimbabwe, from about A.D. 1200, was an ability to plan and carry through construction work on a massive scale, with a steady advance in techniques. Blocks used for building were fitted together without the use of mortar, and as skills progressed, walls became adorned with various patterns; most pervasive was the chevron, a symbol of fertility.⁴

The origin of Great Zimbabwe lay in the building of a stone acropolis amid granite boulders on a hilltop surveying the countryside in all directions. This acropolis with its towers and turrets was, in effect, the palace, and meant that the king’s subjects knew that he was literally looking down on diem. At night they could see the glow of his fires. The climb to the royal presence was steep and exhausting. Entry was controlled by spear-carrying warriors; the doors in walls mounted on the natural rock were so small that a man could go in only by crouching low.

In the valley below were many enclosures, probably occupied by the king’s wives and powerful retainers. The walls of the biggest were six times the height of a man and had drainage channels from the interior floor levels. To make them, a million pieces of dressed granite had been shaped and carried to the site. Inside were circular thatched houses built in the typical African style, with walls of daga, a cement-like earth often taken from anthills. It was customary to paint these walls with bright geometric patterns. Clustered round the enclosures were the huts of the lowly subjects and the slaves, captive survivors from raids on neighbours. The population of the capital grew to as much as 20,000.

The Zimbabwe gold trade was to set off a chain reaction far across the continent. Elephant tusks, dried salt, and iron weapons and implements were carried along forest paths from one market to the next, until they gained a maximum barter value in the more densely-populated districts. Even 1,000 miles away, north of the Zambezi watershed, copper deposits which had been neglected for 300 years were again worked intensively.

The king of Great Zimbabwe ruled a warlike people known as the Karanga. He and the subject chieftains, who lived round the plateau in less imposing settlements, held sway over an area almost the size of France. Their territories spread into what today is Botswana on one side, into Mozambique on the other, and across the Limpopo into what is now South Africa; the granite ruins are their monuments.

The growth of Great Zimbabwe had happened in total isolation from the formation of city-states at much the same time far away on the western side of Africa. The empires of Ghana, Mali and Songhay which rose and fell beside the Niger river might as well have been on another continent. They were almost as far to the north of the equator as Great Zimbabwe was to the south, and much of the 3,000 miles separating them was almost impenetrable tropical forest. Beside central Africa’s inland seas, from which the Nile takes its source east of the Ruwenzori (‘Mountains of the Moon’), lay cultures far more closely allied to Great Zimbabwe. Settlements almost on the same scale seem to have developed there concurrently, to gauge from massive earthworks and irrigation systems; but since their buildings were of wood and thatch, almost all the evidence has vanished in the intervening centuries. The people who lived in them seem, moreover, to have had no connection at all with the trade of the Indian Ocean.

However, one link is clear. In the great lakes region, as was the case 1,500 miles further south, iron-mining and smelting were central to the economy. Great Zimbabwe had grown rich from gold – there were more than 4,000 small gold-mines on the high plateau – but iron ruled the lives of ordinary people. Whereas most of the world first smelted copper, then progressed over many centuries to the making and hardening of iron, Africa took a single leap straight out of the stone age. This new ability spelled power, for wrought-iron weapons transformed the ways in which wars were fought and wild animals hunted; with iron axes men could chop down forests and with hoes dig more land to grow crops.

How iron-age technology developed in the interior of Africa, whether invented independently or acquired from outside, is much debated. It seems to have been used there at least as early as in Egypt or much of Europe. The first known iron-makers in sub-Saharan Africa lived to the west of what is now called Lake Victoria, just below the equator. Others were settled amid the hills of Rwanda and Burundi, in a fastness of extinct volcanoes capped with snow, of deep lakes and heavily-forested hills rich in red, haematite ore. The first traces of smelting in that remote region may date back to 1000 B.C.⁵

The identity of the smelters remains a mystery. They certainly did not come from among the bushman or pygmy communities, the ‘hunting and gathering’ aborigines, since they kept humpbacked zebu cattle (an Asiatic breed) and knew how to grow simple crops. Each clay iron furnace was small but elaborate, with access points all round the base for hand-worked bellows to drive up the heat of the charcoal fire. Swathes of primeval forest were brought down to keep the furnaces fed with hardwood, because the demand for iron tools was unending. It was a pattern which would be repeated in many parts of Africa.

The mastery of smelting may have spread southwards from the Nile valley, from the Nubian city of Meroë, mentioned by the Greek historian Herodotus in 450 B.C. On the outskirts of Meroë are huge mounds of iron-slag – the city has been called the ‘Birmingham of ancient Africa’. However, the earliest evidence of iron at Meroë is dated at about 500 B.C. Another possibility is that the pioneer iron-workers may have migrated to Rwanda and Burundi from the Red Sea, herding their cattle for as much as 2,000 miles until they halted in the fertile heart of the continent. Iron-hardening methods had been ‘discovered’ in Assyria in about 2000 B.C., and the secret spread southwards from there to Arabia.

Once the skill was established at the equator, it advanced steadily southwards along the rocky backbone of Africa. By A.D. 300 iron was being smelted almost at the Cape. In some areas, the remains of hundreds of furnaces are discernible, proving the existence of highly-organized village industries. Iron hoes, like cattle, could be used to buy a bride. The metal-workers formed themselves into guilds, being regarded as men apart. It was the rule that they must practise sexual abstinence before the ores were smelted, and goats were sacrificed when a deposit was discovered. The spirit of the clay furnaces was always female; some were built with protuberances on the outside representing breasts.

At Great Zimbabwe, teams of metal-workers were constantly at their tasks. Those not making iron tools or spears were busy casting the capital’s distinctive H-shaped copper ingots, which served as a form of currency. Smoke from many furnaces hung in the air. Like most other daily activities, smelting was closely concerned with magic. It could well be imagined that restless spirits had been active inside the furnace if the metal proved impure. Rituals must be performed to set them at peace.

The king and his close advisers took divine guidance on such matters at their religious shrines in the acropolis, where the spirits of royal ancestors were worshipped.⁶ The time of the new moon was most auspicious. The senior sister of the king played a main role, for like the king she was regarded as being in direct contact with the ancestors. At Great Zimbabwe the shrines were adorned with green soapstone carvings of mysterious creatures, part bird, part beast, adorned with beads and tautly stylized. Since each is different they may represent the spirits of former kings. These carvings were set on tall monoliths round the shrines and below one of the birds a lifelike crocodile crawls up the pillar. The beaks of the birds are like those of eagles: in Karanga belief, the eagle carries messages between the earth and Murenga, the deity.

Other artistic remnants of the religious rituals are contorted sculptures of men and women, made in soapstone brought from a hundred miles away. The stone was also carved to form circular bowls, twenty inches across, with hieroglyphic-like designs of animals, such as zebra, baboons and dogs, on their vertical sides.

The stone-working skills of the Great Zimbabwean craftsmen, and their ability to make ornaments in gold and copper, had grown out of the traditions of wood-carving and moulding in terracotta. Wooden artefacts have been lost to time and the African climate, but proof of the depth of artistic tradition in southern Africa is to be found in the fired earthenware sculptures discovered on the edge of South Africa’s Drakensberg mountains. Made in or before A.D. 600, what are called the ‘Lydenberg Heads’ were elaborately moulded masks, big enough to be worn completely over the head. The biggest is fifteen inches tall and still bears traces of painted decoration on the terracotta. These heads, dating to at least seven centuries before Great Zimbabwe’s maturity, show an aesthetic sophistication which must have even earlier roots.

Most puzzling of the stone structures at Great Zimbabwe is a conical tower, dominating the largest enclosure. Built of granite blocks, with a core of rubble, it hides no treasure, nor does it guard a royal grave. Meaningless today, the tower was so carefully constructed that it must have carried a precise message to all who saw it in the capital’s time of greatness. Perhaps this represented an African grain store, to assure the people that the king cared about their welfare and would never let them starve. Legend says that this enclosure, more than 800 feet in circumference, within which the tower stands, was built for the ruler’s senior wife. So this might have been yet another symbol proclaiming the virility of the royal line. Two entrances to the enclosure were marked with male and female symbols: a horn and a groove.

For the king’s humbler subjects, in their clusters of huts below the acropolis, life was little different from that in any village on the plateau. Water still had to be carried by the women from the nearest stream, firewood collected, grain pounded and cooked, the dark red earth of the gardens hoed; children looked after the goats and chickens; menfolk herded cattle, hunted game, moulded clay cooking pots, and prepared for war with their spears and clubs when orders came down from the acropolis. Much beer was drunk, especially on feast days such as the new year, when the king’s fire was rekindled and all other fires lit from it.

Existence was governed by fantasy and superstition. When the rainy season did not start on time the people took part in sacrifices at shrines where unseen ‘owners of the land’ had to be appeased. If such sacrifices failed to induce enough rain, women spirit mediums were consulted.

It was a mark of their spirit power – and, without doubt, their ruthlessness – that Great Zimbabwe’s monarchs held their subjects together for centuries around the nucleus of a city-state. But there was a fatal limitation: the ability to keep records was never mastered, nor was any form of writing borrowed from the Indian Ocean cultures with whom the gold trade had put its rulers in touch. In the course of more than three hundred years, coundess trade caravans were sent to the coast, where the leaders would have seen accounts being recorded in Arabic. Emissaries must likewise have travelled inland, bearing written messages to be read out to the king of what the Arabs called ‘Zabnawi, the land of gold’. More than any other sub-Saharan society, Great Zimbabwe had the opportunity and the need to start keeping written records, yet failed to take the decisive step to literacy.⁷

Instead, it was stultified by clinging to the oral culture of African rural life. When a ruler felt the need to send tidings or commands to an outlying village he would choose a courier who could be relied upon to memorize his words. During a long journey the courier would tie knots in a string to record how many days it had taken, and on his return the string was saved for future reference. Various methods of arithmetic were used and bundles of sticks tied with cords or marked with notches were used as tallies in trade.

Religious practices remained simple: there was no scholarly priesthood dedicated to setting down the precise form of rituals and the days in the calendar when they must be performed. The lunar months were divided into three weeks, made up of nine or ten days. Law-giving was not based upon written statutes, but on social customs, and the interpretation of signs. Above all, the spirits of the ancestors permeated everything in life: the spirit world was indivisible from reality and existence was as repetitive as the seasons. The keeping of records would have meant a linear progression in time, a rejection of the past, but the presence of the spirits weighed heavily against that.

A civilization could not be built on the shifting sands of memory alone, and black Africa’s only literate people, apart from the Muslim converts of West Africa and the Zanj coast, remained the Ethiopians, far away in the north-east, using their ancient Ge’ez language. All the wealth of the gold trade had failed in the end to transmute the fundamental nature of Great Zimbabwe’s society.⁸

As Al-Mas’udi had discovered in the tenth century, wealth in cattle was what always mattered most in southern Africa: from early times, figurines of oxen had been revered and cattle were ceremonially buried. The king ruled the herd as he ruled the people; he was, in reality, just the most powerful pastoralist. So when some insoluble problems confronted the state, shortly after 1400, Great Zimbabwe was simply abandoned. With his cattle and his people, the king moved on.

What tolled the knell of Great Zimbabwe can only be guessed at. It may have been a conflict among the rulers over the succession, or a long drought and the exhaustion of the soil. Equally possible, there was a sudden advance of the lethal tsetse fly from the lowlands, attacking both the cattle and the people.

The king who ordered the abandonment of Great Zimbabwe after almost four centuries is said to have been called Nyatsimba Mutota. He went north, nearer to the Zambezi river and the gold-mines of the high plateau, and founded the empire of the Mwene Mutapa. This became translated as Monomotapa, and was to appear on maps for many centuries as a mighty state of the African interior. Yet Monomotapa was never as powerful as Great Zimbabwe, whose flecked grey stones leave so many questions unanswered.

The acropolis and the enclosures may have been an almost chance response to economic prosperity: there merely happened to be more stone available than wood, since so many trees had been cut down to make charcoal for smelting. Alternatively, Great Zimbabwe could be seen as the unfulfilled prelude to the development of a distinctly African civilization; in their new home the Karanga people might have gone on to adapt to literacy and organize a fully-fledged state based upon it. History did not grant time for such possibilities to be resolved, because Africa south of the equator was about to enter a new era.

PART TWO

TWELVE
Prince Henry’s Far Horizons

Bell, book and candle shall not drive me back,

When gold and silver becks me to come on.

—Shakespeare, King John, III, iii

THE YEAR 1415 was memorable for the kings of Portugal and England, for each had a feat of arms to celebrate. In August an armada of small ships from Lisbon had captured the Moorish town of Ceuta, on the North African coast, and in October the bowmen of England routed the French at Agincourt. For Henry V, victory had been hard won, whereas John of Portugal’s losses – only eight men killed – were almost absurdly light. This was because the governor of Ceuta, having summoned a Berber force to help defend the town, sent it home too soon; he had decided that the attack was never going to materialize because of reports that the 240 Portuguese craft sailing towards him were too tiny and ill-manned to contend with the winds and currents in the Strait of Gibraltar. (The ships were a motley assortment, some being hired from England for the occasion against a promise of payment in consignments of salt.)

In the event, a good number of Muslims were slaughtered, their houses and stores were thoroughly looted, and the Pope declared the undertaking to be a holy crusade. The main mosque was turned into a church. King John proudly declared that he had ‘washed his hands in infidel blood’, to make amends for any offences he might have committed against God in his daily life, and set about celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of his reign.¹

It was certainly spectacular to capture and keep a town in North Africa, especially one so strategically placed only fifteen miles across the water from Gibraltar. Ceuta, just east of Tangier, boasted a history going back to Roman times, and the Arabs had used it in the past to control shipping in the western Mediterranean. The Portuguese were also happy to outshine their rivals the Castilians, who sixteen years earlier had raided Tetuan, a town not far from Ceuta; half of Tetuan’s citizens were massacred and the rest enslaved, but then the Castilians withdrew. The aims of the new masters of Ceuta were less fleeting.

Portugal was small, poor and ignorant, but its pride was formidable. The ruling dynasty had won the loyalty of the people, shortly after coming to power, for having fought off Castile’s attempt to conquer them in the final decades of the previous century. Confidence had also been raised by the king’s marriage ties with England: his queen was Philippa of Lancaster, and among courtiers in Lisbon the legends of Camelot and its knights were favourite reading. The eldest of the Portuguese princes, Duarte, Pedro and Henry, took part in the fighting at Ceuta and immediately after its capture they were dubbed knights by their father. Queen Philippa had encouraged them in feats of arms (not for nothing was she the daughter of John of Gaunt) but was denied the pleasure of welcoming them home from their triumph at Ceuta; as they were returning she died of the plague.

In their plundering of Ceuta’s well-built houses the Portuguese were astounded by the silks from China, the silver-embroidered muslins from India and many other luxuries. ‘Our poor homes look like pigsties in comparison,’ admitted one Portuguese chronicler. The curiosity of the royal princes was aroused by the stories they heard from their captives about the interior of Africa, beyond the peaks of the Rif mountains overlooking Ceuta. They learnt about the Sahara desert to the south, across which the camel caravans journeyed to a ‘River of Gold’.² One account said that on the river bank there were ants the size of cats, digging up gold and leaving it in heaps for humans to collect. This ancient myth of gold-digging ants was readily believed. Like everyone else in Europe, the Portuguese knew virtually nothing about Africa and assumed it to be populated by monsters and cannibals.

Depictions of Mali’s long-dead king, the Mansa Musa, seated on a golden throne, had been inserted on medieval maps of Africa merely to fill up space and hide the ignorance of cartographers. As recently as 1410, Ptolemy’s Geography had been ‘rediscovered’ from Arab sources, but it was more misleading than helpful. A few secretive Genoese, Catalans and Jews controlled the northern end of the desert trade in gold, in towns where caravans reached the Mediterranean, but even they knew little about the source of the metal. Isolated in their tiny enclave at Ceuta, the Portuguese had no way of taking part in the Saharan trade.

Every rumour picked up in Ceuta about African gold was of compelling interest to King John, because his country was so painfully short of the metal. The price of gold had risen several hundred times in Lisbon within a few decades.³ It was a matter of pride for any country to mint its own gold coinage, acceptable as payment for imports, but John’s treasury was too empty for that; so Portugal used the currency of richer neighbours, including that of ‘infidel’ Morocco.

The prestige earned by Ceuta’s capture was soon overlaid with greater issues in Europe. The Catholic Church was convulsed by the ‘Great Schism’, with rival popes contending for power, and by a surge of revolt against the dictates of Rome; a famous Bohemian heretic, Jan Hus, had been burned at the stake a few weeks before the occupation of Ceuta. Any attention that could be spared from religious disputation tended to be directed towards the east, and the advance into Europe of the Ottoman Turks, former nomads from the Asian steppes. Constantinople was in peril. The Turks had by-passed Byzantium’s great citadel, choosing instead to cross the Bosphorus into Europe and overrun most of the Balkans; but everyone knew that they would, in their own time, turn back to lay siege to Constantinople itself. Despite the Castilian reconquest of almost all of Andalusia, rarely had the threat to Christendom seemed greater. The thirteenth-century dreams of an all-conquering alliance with the Mongols were dead. Islam was resurgent and the Ottoman Turks were its spearhead.

This was, in consequence, a moment when the known world, stretching from China to the Atlantic, was more physically divided than ever. Asia’s overland route, along which Marco Polo and countless other merchants once travelled and which the Mongols had kept open, had been effectively shut to Christian travellers for a century. A few missionaries struggled as far as Samarkand, but could go no further. Only the most daring European travellers tried to reach the lands around the Indian Ocean by way of the Black Sea or Syria or Egypt, and few returned. For centuries hopes had flickered of somehow reaching the East by sea, yet medieval geography was so irrational that there was no clear idea of which direction to take.

Until some route could be found it was likely that a virtual monopoly of Europe’s trade with the East would remain in the hands of glittering Venice, ‘La Serenissima’. Its merchants were stationed in the ports of the eastern Mediterranean, and in Constantinople itself, bargaining with their Muslim counterparts for the pepper, cinnamon, ginger, nutmegs, rubies, pearls and silks brought from beyond the barriers of Islam. As recently as 1413 the ruler of the Turks, Mehmet I, had signed a fresh treaty with Venice, guaranteeing the security of its trading colonies. The unique power of the Venetians was resented by their rivals, but there seemed little to be done.

Europe’s passion for culinary spices – which were believed to have medicinal value and to purify mouldering foods – had continued to grow since the Crusades, so the prices were high. Most valued of all was pepper, used both in cooking and as a preservative. Pepper was rubbed into meat, together with salt, when the farmers slaughtered large parts of their herds and flocks at the start of winter. Cloves were similarly valued, their pungent ‘nails’ being pressed into meat when it was roasted. By the fifteenth century the words ‘spices’ had come to embrace a wide range of exotic goods from Asia, including scents, cosmetics, dyes, glues, pomanders to ward off the plague, even sugar and fine muslins. The volume of Chinese silks and porcelains reaching Europe had also risen sharply, although Europe did not know why (that these luxuries were brought in bulk to the Indian Ocean ports by the fleets of Zheng He).

So galling was the supremacy of Venice, so tantalizing the wealth it had acquired, that various rivals sought to break its grip. The Genoese tried hardest of all, but their long wars with Venice had ended in costly failure by the start of the fifteenth century. For the moment Portugal counted for nothing in these great rivalries. It did not even have a Mediterranean coastline, but lay on the outer rim of mainland Europe, its ports facing the restless Atlantic. In the scales of political influence, Portugal lacked both wealth and manpower. Moreover, its clergy were despised in the higher reaches of the Church, generally held to be ill-educated and too fond of keeping concubines.

Yet the knightly ardour of King John and two of his sons, Pedro and Henry, had been fired by their venture across the narrow straits between Europe and Africa. Prince Henry, in particular, saw Morocco as an outlet for his ambitions. Being a third son he was never likely to be king, but he had implicit faith in his horoscope, and court astrologers had declared that because of the positions of Mars and Saturn at his birth he was destined to ‘discover great secrets and make noble conquests’. This prophecy would be remembered when Portuguese historians told how he had sown the seeds of his country’s achievements on the high seas and in distant lands.

At the age of twenty-five, the thin and temperamental Henry took himself off to Cape St Vincent in the Algarve. It was the south-westerly tip of Europe, a headland thrusting into the Atlantic like the prow of a ship. Legends which later grew up around Henry were closely linked to Cape St Vincent and Sagres, a village sheltered from the ocean gales by its cliffs. It was said that he built a castle at Sagres, and gathered round himself a cabal of wise men such as map-makers, astronomers and mariners. That picture owes a lot to imagination. Henry did build a fortified camp at Sagres, as accommodation for sailors waiting behind the cape for calm weather, but most of his time in the south was spent at Lagos, a port fifteen miles further east. (As for the prince’s romantic title, ‘Henry the Navigator’, that was bestowed upon him by a German historian in the nineteenth century; he was not a practical navigator and never captained a ship in his life.)

However, Cape St Vincent was certainly a place to dream of deeds of chivalry, of felling the hordes of the ‘abominable sect of Mohamed’. So obsessed did the prince become with ideas of valour and piety that it was even said he had taken a vow of chastity. All around were reminders of the time, little more than a century earlier, when the Algarve was governed by Muslims. The queen heightened Henry’s visions by giving him what was said to be a piece of wood from the cross on which Jesus had died, and the king put him at the head of the Order of Christ, a religious and military society created in Portugal with the papal blessing in 1319. The Order of Christ replaced the discredited Knights Templars, and its purpose was to ‘defend Christians from Muslims and to carry the war to them in their own territory’. The Portuguese had already put their hands to this holy task, and it was to become the justification for all their bloodiest deeds.

Henry looked back fondly, as did his contemporaries in Lisbon, to the world of Charlemagne and the Arthurian romances, but was realistic enough to see that gunpowder, one of the inventions that had filtered across the world from China, was about to transform the arts of war. The formula for gunpowder had been widely known for at least a century (the English philosopher and scientist Roger Bacon possessed a ‘secret recipe’ as early as 1260), but the skills for exploiting it grew only slowly. At Ceuta and Agincourt in 1415, guns played no part, although earlier in the year the English had used primitive bombards, firing stone balls, when they successfully besieged the port of Harfleur. Guns were hard work to move in an age when roads scarcely existed, and their range was short, so on land they were as yet only effective in sieges, when the attackers had ample time to set them up.

The value of guns at sea was more quickly apparent. Once these cumbersome weapons were fixed to the deck, ready for action, the ship itself gave them mobility. The English, as a seafaring nation, pioneered the use of guns at sea – although they were too small to have much effect – during the battle of Sluys in 1340. A generation later, naval gunfire had grown more lethal: a Danish prince was killed by a stone ball shot from a German ship. Soon afterwards the Venetians began installing bombards in their war galleys, firing forwards over the bows.

Early in the fifteenth century the English were designing large ships armed with cannons. Some were built in Bayonne, the port in southwest France still held by Henry VI. His Portuguese namesake and kinsman would undoubtedly have been made aware of their potential, and by 1419 the Portuguese were able to deploy vessels armed with guns to deter a Spanish Muslim fleet sent to try and recapture Ceuta.

It is not known what first steered Henry’s thoughts towards the challenge of the Atlantic and the mysteries of Africa, for he was the most secretive member of a tight-lipped family. However, the improvements in ship design, combined with the advances in gunnery, were to bring consequences for Portugal which even he could never have dreamed of. History had portrayed Henry as a visionary; rather, he was ruthlessly ambitious. The exhortations of the Order of Christ for the launching of a holy war against the Muslims in their own lands merely bestowed on his ambitions the aura of sanctity.

At first, his interests lay close at hand. Only two days’ journey across the water from Cape St Vincent was Tangier. Although he might never be the king of Portugal, at least he thought he could make himself the viceroy of wealthy Morocco. To drive the infidels from it would be a sweet revenge for their eight centuries of rule in the Iberian peninsula. When his father, the king, rejected these schemes as too risky and vainglorious, the rebuff encouraged Henry to direct his thoughts beyond Morocco, across the desert to the ‘River of Gold’.

An Arab prisoner taken by the Portuguese gave some details of the trade routes across the deserts, and even told of lakes in the heart of Africa. Henry knew that Muslims would never let Christians go to the fabled Rio del Oro by land; but since the river presumably flowed into the Atlantic, it might instead be reached by following the coast of Africa southwards.

He kept courtiers around him who could be despatched on such missions in spring and summer, when the winds blew from the northeast. The prince had control of several ships, which regularly went on trading and fishing voyages from Sagres and Lagos. Most important were the documents he had collected about the vessels of those other nations which had tried to explore southwards, down the African coast.⁴

The fate of the Vivaldi brothers of Genoa was well remembered. Men still wondered where their expedition had come to grief after it sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar in 1291 to search for a way around Africa to India. A Catalan map made half a century later bore an inscription saying that a certain Jaime Ferrer from Majorca had sailed past a Moroccan landmark known as Cape Bojador (at 26°N) where the shoreline was desert and the ‘Land of the Blacks’ began. Ferrer had also vanished without trace, and sailors claimed that any ship going beyond Cape Bojador – in Arabic Bon Khatar (‘Father of Danger’) – could never return.⁵ Several French fishing-boats from the port of Dieppe had also disappeared in those waters in more recent years. Superstitious people asserted that these adventurers had paid with their lives for sailing into the ‘Torrid Zone’, one of five climatic regions into which medieval geographers divided the world.

Henry’s pride was challenged by the activities of other nations on the African coast. The French, looking for new fishing grounds, seemed a particular threat, because as early as 1401 a party of French seamen had gone ashore near Cape Bojador in a small boat, captured some African villagers, then carried them back to the Canary islands. A year later a Norman knight, Jean de Béthencourt, occupied the Canaries and proclaimed himself king.⁶ The Castillans, who saw the islands ultimately as a prize for themselves, had encouraged him. The Portuguese tried to seize the islands, since they were strategically placed near the coast, but failed. Henry decided to push on southwards.

Year after year he sent his ships towards Cape Bojador. They were only small cargo vessels, little more than rowing boats with sails, and when they found themselves caught in strong currents they fled back towards Portugal. The main reward lay in plundering any Moroccan craft encountered along the coast. For fifteen years the prince sent his courtiers on these expeditions, and at last Cape Bojador was rounded. A squire named Gil Eanes sailed out into the Atlantic, to avoid the coastal currents, then made a landfall to the south of the fearsome cape. The Portuguese had at last touched the fringe of the ‘Land of the Blacks’. The year was 1434, almost twenty years after the first step into Africa, the capture of Ceuta.

THIRTEEN
Commanding the Guinea Coast

The city belong; to God.

—Prince Henry, when asked why Ceuta would not be exchanged for his brother Fernando, captured by the Moroccans (c. 1440)

FOR A WHILE, Prince Henry was diverted from exploring Africa’s coastline. King John was dead and his eldest son Duarte sat on the throne. A mild man, known as the ‘philosopher king’, Duarte gave way at last to Henry’s demands that Portugal should try to extend its power in Morocco by capturing Tangier.

The attack took place in 1437 and was a calamity. The army under Henry’s command was cut to shreds and his youngest brother, Fernando, was captured and taken as a hostage to Fez. These events so shocked Duarte that his health gave way and he succumbed to the plague the following year. The Moroccans offered to free Fernando if the Portuguese would evacuate Ceuta, but Henry scorned the suggestion.¹ Although the captive prince sent pleading letters home, he was abandoned to God’s mercy and died after five years in a dungeon. The Portuguese proclaimed him a Christian martyr.

The second of Portugal’s royal brothers, Pedro, had been far keener than Henry to strike a bargain for the release of Fernando, but otherwise held himself aloof from the Tangier disaster. During a tour of Europe he had done his share of fighting some years earlier, against the Ottoman Turks invading Hungary.

The Turks had shown themselves far fiercer than the Muslims of Andalusia and Morocco, so it had been something of a relief for Pedro when he left Hungary and travelled south to Venice. The newly-elected Doge, Francesco Foscari, chose to welcome the Portuguese prince in extravagant style, since there was an awareness that this visitor might easily become a king, given the uncertainties of the time. In any case, the Doge had a fondness for pageantry.²

At one banquet, Pedro was dazzled by the sight of 250 women from the city’s most patrician families dressed in the finest silks from the Orient. He had arrived at the banquet in the great state barge, with swarms of lesser craft escorting it. During his stay the prince attended many balls and feasts; he also inspected the ships under construction around the Lagoon, being like his brother Henry a keen follower of maritime innovations. Pedro envied the voluptuous wealth of Venice, built upon its long trade with the East.

As a parting gift the Doge handed him a rare manuscript of the memoirs of Marco Polo, doyen of Venetian travellers. This was a gesture of greater significance than either could have foreseen, for in years to come the Portuguese would be urged on by Marco Polo’s descriptions of the East to feats which would spell the economic ruin of Venice.

His disaster at Tangier had driven Prince Henry back to the Algarve, back to scheming about how to reach the ‘River of Gold’. Until 1440 this was the limit of his ambitions, but shortly afterwards his mind began racing ahead to more grandiose goals. He was emboldened by the development of a new kind of ship, the caravel. Usually no more than 60 feet long, yet strong and fast, the smooth-hulled caravels were a leap forward in design from the cumbersome clinker-built ‘cogs’ or the primitive barchas using oars and sails.

The early caravels were never designed to be cargo carriers and their capacity was little more than 50 tons, but they were ideal as ocean trail-blazers. Since they drew only six feet they could be used close inshore, but with their high prows they were equally able to face Atlantic storms. They needed a complement of only twenty-five men, and although the sailors had to sleep as best they could on the open deck or in the hold, there were rudimentary cabins for the officers in the stem ‘castle’. Mariners grew more daring in these craft.

The caravel was designed to exploit the advantages of its triangular lateen sail by steering closer to the wind (the sail had been adapted from the typical Arab rig by Italian mariners and from them came the name ‘latin’ or ‘lateen’). Advances in navigation and the caravel’s sail made it easier to return to Portugal from south of Cape Bojador by sailing westwards and north-west into the Atlantic wind-system, far from the sight of land, towards Madeira and the Azores (which so came to be discovered and occupied). The Portuguese coast was then approached across the prevailing wind from the west.³

The country whose ships had barely managed to reach Ceuta in 1415 was emerging as a conqueror of the ocean: the waves pounding on the Portuguese coasts were a ceaseless reminder of the challenge beyond the horizons. There was nothing to be discovered in the Mediterranean, for its every island, every harbour, had been known since Roman times. Instead, the Atlantic became Portugal’s hunting-ground, an ocean of boundless possibility. Somewhere beyond it, either to the west or the south, nobody quite knew, lay the tantalizing Indies and the land of the Great Khan which Marco Polo had visited a century and a half before.

By the 1440s there was already a scent of the profits in these Atlantic voyages, for Portuguese ships were sailing well beyond Africa’s desert shoreline and nearing the mouths of the Senegal and Gambia rivers. Not only were they reaching waters where the fishing-grounds were rich, but in the coastal villages their trade goods could be exchanged for Malian gold, ivory and exotic spices. Foreign captains – mostly Venetians and Genoese – were told by Henry when he hired them that their first duty was to bring back gold. Part of the gold was used to buy English and French goods such as cloth and tin bowls, which the Portuguese then used for trade with the Africans.

Most rewarding was slave-raiding. Portugal had only a million people (in contrast, Spain had eight million and France sixteen million) and labour was needed for plantations in the Algarve and the Azores, where sugar had been found to flourish. As freebooters of various nations had already done in the Canary islands, armed gangs of Portuguese began storming ashore in Africa, to attack unsuspecting villages, seize the young men and women, and haul them back to the ships. The communities in these coastal villages were simple, far removed from the highly-organized Islamic kingdoms of the interior. The inhabitants had originally greeted the white visitors with friendly awe, but this soon changed to terror.

The very first blacks brought back were simply ‘for the amusement of Prince Henry’. The date was 1441. However, the idea soon took hold; after being baptized some black prisoners were sent home as hostages for more of their own people. A Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eannes de Zurara, relates how 200 or more black slaves were auctioned in 1445 in the Algarve port of Lagos. The prince himself made an appearance, riding down to collect forty-six Africans, his one-fifth entitlement. The Franciscans, who had a monastery near Cape St Vincent, were also given some. Since horses were much in demand in West Africa, and these were plentiful in Morocco, it was found possible to use them for barter. At first it was possible to exchange one horse for fourteen slaves, but later one for six became the norm.⁴

There were no moral doubts in Portugal about the slave-trading conducted by the caravel captains, for slavery was already well established all across southern Europe. The Venetians used slaves in large numbers to grow sugar in Crete, their largest colony. Greeks, Tartars and Russians were regularly offered for sale in Spain by Italian merchants. Moreover, after eight centuries of Islam in the Iberian peninsula, the custom was entirely familiar, and prisoners taken in battle thought themselves fortunate to be sold rather than slaughtered.

However, the Portuguese were notably scrupulous about having their heathen captives baptized into Christianity, to save their souls from damnation. (In later years the slaves were baptized before they left Africa’s shores, lest they died in transit.) There was a duty to bring all mankind to the true faith, so the enforced conversion of slaves served God’s will. Henry decided to take his religious obligations further, by ruling that a twenty-first part of all merchandise brought from Africa should go to the Order of Christ. He listed slaves first, ahead of gold and fish.

Among the many Italians sailing in the Portuguese caravels was a young Venetian, Alvise da Cadamosta. He made two voyages to Senegal and Cape Verde in the 1450s, then wrote the first known eye-witness account by a European of daily life in black Africa. Educated, inquisitive and humane, Cadamosta visited coastal villages, questioned the chiefs about their domestic arrangements, sampled an elephant steak, and studied how birds built their nests in palm-trees. One day he went to a market: ‘I perceived quite clearly that these people are exceedingly poor, judging from the wares they brought for sale – that is, cotton, but not in large quantities, cotton thread and cloth, vegetables, oil and millet, wooden bowls, palm leaf mats, and all the other articles they use in their daily life.’

Cadamosta’s presence in the villages caused something of a sensation:

These negroes, men and women, crowded to see me as though I were a marvel … My clothes were after the Spanish fashion, a doublet of black damask, with a short cloak of grey wool over it. They examined the woollen cloth, which was new to them, and the doublet with much amazement: some touched my hands and limbs, and rubbed me with their spittle to discover whether my whiteness was dye or flesh. Finding that it was flesh they were astounded.

In many ways the Africans delighted him: ‘The women of this country are very pleasant and light-hearted, ready to sing and to dance, especially the young girls. They dance, however, only at night by the light of the moon. Their dances are very different from ours.’

Yet Cadamosta did his share of fighting, and had no compunction about bartering horses for slaves. When a baptized slave brought out from Portugal to act as an interpreter was put ashore at a spot where the caravels hoped to trade, he was instantly killed by the local people. Without realizing it, Cadamosta had been taking part in the first stages of an historic confrontation, the Atlantic slave trade.

When he returned to Portugal the Venetian was personally welcomed by Henry, to whom he presented an elephant’s foot and a tusk ‘twelve spans long’. These the prince passed on to his sister, the duchess of Burgundy. Dutifully, Cadamosta praised Henry’s virtues, his readiness to ‘devote all to the service of our lord Jesus Christ in warring with the barbarians and fighting for the faith’.

The Portuguese badly needed to recruit foreigners of Cadamosta’s calibre, but as their caravels explored further into unknown waters the desire for secrecy became an obsession. This was demonstrated when a ship’s pilot and two sailors fled to Castile after a voyage to West Africa. They were accused of theft, but the real fear was that they would ‘disserve the king’ by revealing navigational secrets. They were followed; the two sailors were beheaded and the pilot was brought back ‘with hooks in his mouth’ to be executed. His body was quartered and put on display to discourage any more intending turncoats. Death was the accepted penalty for giving away the details of charts; it was equally forbidden to sell a caravel to any foreigner.

The Castilians were warned to leave Africa to the Portuguese by a papal bull issued in 1455 by Nicholas V. This gave Portugal exclusive rights of conquest and possession in all ‘Saracen or pagan lands’ beyond Cape Bojador. The bull was issued in response to appeals from Prince Henry, after Castile had laid tentative claims to the ‘Guinea coast’ (a term newly coined by European mariners). The Pope declared that Henry believed he would best perform his duty to God by making the sea navigable ‘as far as the Indians, who are said to worship the name of Christ, and that he thus might be able to enter into relations with them, and to incite them to aid the Christians against the Saracens and other such enemies of the faith’. Thus the Vatican openly proclaimed Henry’s ultimate goal: to sail to India by circumnavigating Africa.

The papal bull had been issued two years after the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks, a moment when Europe was quaking at the thought of where the ‘Mohamedans’ might strike next. Western Christendom had quarrelled down the centuries with Byzantium, over religious doctrine and more material matters, but all too late regretted its demise, its martyrdom. The Portuguese had responded with a unique militancy to the Pope’s call to Christian nations to unite to recover Constantinople. Despite claims of a revelation from God that the victorious Sultan Mehmet II would be defeated and brought as a prisoner to Rome, to be ‘stamped under the foot of the Pope’ and forcibly baptized, only in Lisbon was there any eagerness for a new ‘crusade against the Infidel’. The fervent Portuguese proclaimed that they would raise an army 12,000 strong. They also minted a coin, made with West African gold, and called it the cruzado (crusade).

For the merchant states of Italy, the fall of Constantinople was of far more immediate moment, because it struck at the heart of their trade. All over the Mediterranean, Christian ships went in fear of being captured or sunk by Turkish raiders. Since the Turks never ventured beyond the Strait of Gibraltar the geographical good fortune of the Portuguese grew ever more apparent. Their caravels feared only the challenge of marauding Castilians as they advanced doggedly southwards in the Atlantic and down the West African coast.

In 1436, another bull had granted the Order of Christ jurisdiction ‘all the way to the Indians’. This steady flow of papal encouragement entrenched in the minds of the royal family in Lisbon that it was their destiny and religious duty to find the route to the East. The young King Afonso proclaimed extravagantly that his uncle, Prince Henry, had ‘conquered the coasts of Guinea, Nubia and Ethiopia, desirous of winning for God’s holy church, and reducing to obedience to us, those barbarous peoples whose lands Christians had never before dared to visit’.

However, the last events in Henry’s life had nothing to do with this vision. In 1458 he returned to the scenes of the first Portuguese venture into Africa, when he helped Afonso capture Alcacer Ceguer, a town next to Ceuta. The army used for the purpose was the one originally raised to help liberate Constantinople from the Turks, but never despatched because all other European countries drew back from action. For Henry the assault on Alcacer Ceguer was heart-stirring, since all his brothers were dead and he was one of a diminishing few who could recall the victory at Ceuta, more than forty years earlier.⁵

Two years later Henry died, at the age of sixty-six. His dream of reaching the ‘land of the Indies’ was unfulfilled, although black slaves were now being brought back to Portugal at a rate of 30,000 a year, many for re-export to Spain and Italy. By the time of Henry’s death the caravels were exploring 1,500 miles beyond Cape St Vincent. They had rounded the great bulge of West Africa and were following the coastline almost due east. It seemed, deceptively, that the route to the Indies lay straight ahead.

After Henry’s death the task of carrying forward the voyages of discovery was contracted out to a Portuguese businessman, Fernando Gomez, on terms that would financially benefit the crown. The arrangement left King Afonso free to concentrate on ways to strike another blow in Morocco. By 1471, he was ready to attack an enemy temptingly weakened through the incompetence of its sultans. A 30,000-strong army boarded 300 ships: caravels and the larger armed merchant vessels known as carracks. The destination was Arzila, a seaport on the Atlantic coast some forty miles south of Tangier. It was in no way a military bastion, and had little chance of defying the heavily-armed Portuguese attackers. After a brief resistance, the population surrendered and awaited its fate. Afonso quickly settled that: 2,000 inhabitants, men, women and children, were put to the sword, and 5,000 were carried off as slaves.⁶

News of the massacre spread north to the city of Tangier, whose people knew that their turn must be next. Panic took hold and the population fled either by land or sea, carrying with them what they could. Other nearby towns capitulated without a fight. The Portuguese marched in unchallenged. Prince John, the sixteen-year-old heir to the throne, was taken by his father on this exhilarating crusade, a revenge for the humiliation inflicted upon Prince Henry at Tangier more than thirty years earlier.

Viewed from the Moroccan side, the loss of Tangier, in particular, was a catastrophe. The city’s 700-year-old role as the gateway to Europe, to Andalusia, had been reversed. The birthplace of Ibn Battuta now became a point of departure for Afonso’s onslaughts. Since it was customary to honour monarchs with a soubriquet, the conquering hero of Arzila and Tangier became entitled ‘Afonso the African’.

The Moroccan crusade in the final decades of the fifteenth century was to set the pattern for Portugal’s behaviour in later conquests much further afield. Many of the young knights – the noble fidalgos – received unforgettable lessons in plundering, raping and killing without mercy. They came to accept that the lives of Muslims, men, women and children alike, counted for nothing because they were the foes of Christendom.

So 1471 had been memorable for the victories in Morocco, and it was momentous in another way. Far to the south, in waters where no European had ever sailed before, a captain called Alvaro Esteves crossed the equator, close to an island he named São Tomé. What was more, he found that the African coastline had changed direction again; his caravels’ bows were once more pointing due south. On his seaward side the ocean seemed endless. To landward, the snake-green forest was impenetrable, hiding everything beyond the shoreline.

Although the entrepreneur Gomez had met his side of the bargain, extending the range of the caravels for another 1,500 miles, his contract was ended in 1475. By that time Portugal was facing a critical challenge along the Guinea coast from the Spaniards. Prince John took charge of driving them out. Fighting between the rival caravels for the right to exploit the African trade was savage. Prisoners were never taken; captives were hanged or thrown overboard.

The Spaniards had more ships, the Portuguese were more ferocious. In 1478 a thirty-five-strong Spanish fleet arrived off West Africa to do battle, and it was defeated. The Portuguese monopoly of the route to the Indian Ocean was secure.

FOURTEEN
The Shape of the Indies

They report therefore that there were in Inde three thousand Townes of very large receit, and nyne thousand sundry sorts of people. Moreover it was believed a long time to be the third part of the world.

—Caius Julius Solinus, c. A.D. 300. trans Arthur Golding (1587)

DURING THE LAST TWO DECADES of the fifteenth century the Portuguese sailed ever onwards through the South Atlantic; yet the further they explored beyond the Guinea Coast the more meagre were the material rewards: good harbours were scarce and the inhabitants of coastal villages vanished into the forests before landing parties could capture them.¹ Africa seemed both hostile and never-ending. King Afonso, notorious for the waxing and waning of his enthusiasms, began losing faith in this costly venture into the unknown. His doubts infected the court.

The Portuguese also had deeper anxieties. When they looked beyond the Atlantic, to the time when Africa’s geography might finally be conquered, they saw vast gaps in their knowledge of what they must then confront. What should be their strategy upon reaching the East, that wondrous goal? Facts were so scanty that ‘Indies’ was a term often used to embrace all the world from the Nile to China.

India itself was sometimes reputed to be an immense country, at others a patchwork of many fertile isles. Regarding the seas round the Indies – their extent, their winds, their currents – even less was known. The names of a few Indian Ocean ports were common currency, but there was little idea of where they were in relation to one another.

The Portuguese could have learned a great deal from accounts by Arab travellers such as Ibn Battuta, but these seem to have been out of reach. By far the best source on the Indies was still the thirteenth-century narrative by Marco Polo. A few missionaries had found their way to the East since his time, but their accounts were fragmentary. Most of what the Greek and Roman historians once knew was now lost or surviving only in garbled forms, such as the much-translated work of Solinus.

For decades the Portuguese brooded over every scrap of information. After the fall of Constantinople it had even become perilous to set foot in the Muslim lands flanking the eastern Mediterranean – Turkey, Syria and Egypt – which before 1453 could still be visited by adventurous Christians whose purpose, or excuse, was to see the holy places of Jerusalem. The triumph of the Ottoman Turks over Byzantium had closed many windows on the East.

Yet there were clues to be garnered from the memoirs of Europeans who had visited those lands shortly before Constantinople fell. Most detailed of all was the narrative of a French knight, Bertrandon de la Brocquière, an intimate of the Duke of Burgundy. With several friends he went to Venice by way of Rome in the spring of 1432, and from there to Palestine. When his aristocratic companions turned for home, la Brocquière set off to Damascus, where he found that European merchants were locked into their homes at night and closely watched. ‘The Christians are hated at Damascus,’ he wrote.

Dressed as an Arab, la Brocquière spent months wandering through Turkey. By his own account he was many times lucky to escape assassination, and although he once came to a valley where the road led to Persia, he did not dare take it. The military strength and confidence of the Turks was far greater than he had expected, although when safely back in Burgundy he felt it his duty to put forward a scheme for defeating them. (It involved bringing together the best bowmen of France, England and Germany, supported by light cavalry and infantry armed with battleaxes. After driving the Turks from eastern Europe this army might, ‘if sufficiently numerous’, even march on to take Jerusalem.)

While in Damascus the Burgundian had watched a caravan of 3,000 camels arrive in the city, with pilgrims from Mecca. He learned that spices from India were brought up the Red Sea ‘in large ships’ to the coast near Mecca. ‘Thither the Mohammedans go to purchase them. They load them on camels, and other beasts of burden, for the markets of Cairo, Damascus and other places, as is well known.’

This was the trade which Portugal yearned to usurp. In those Arab markets the main buyers of pepper and silks and other oriental products had always been merchants from Italy, and the Venetians above all. If truth about the Indies was to be sifted from fantasy, then Venice was surely the place for the Portuguese to begin their investigations.² Moreover, relations between Lisbon and the mighty republic had been cordial ever since the visit of Prince Pedro in 1428.

Italy did not fail the Portuguese. Shortly before the middle of the fifteenth century a Venetian named Nicolo de’ Conti had appeared in Rome after twenty-five years abroad. His first action was to ask for an audience with the Pope, to seek absolution for having (as he claimed, to save his life) renounced Christianity in favour of Islam during his travels. The Pope, Eugene IV, was sympathetic to Nicolo, and the penance he imposed was mild: the Venetian must recount his experiences to the papal secretary, Poggio Bracciolini.

With his inquisitive and rational mind, Poggio typified the new spirit of the Renaissance. He was preparing a world encyclopaedia entitled On the Vicissitudes of Fortune, and his interest in geography was keen. In the past he had written to Prince Henry of Portugal, congratulating him extravagantly for his maritime explorations: by penetrating regions unknown, Henry was even ‘exceeding the deeds of Alexander the Great’.

Nicolo de’ Conti had much to relate about a career which had taken him to the borders of China. In 1419, when he was a young man, Nicolo had gone to Damascus, set up as a merchant, then decided to travel eastwards with a trading caravan. But unlike Bertrandon de la Brocquière, he did not turn back at the decisive moment. Adopting Persian dress, and speaking Arabic and Persian, Nicolo found his way to India. From there he spent many years sailing from port to port round the Indian Ocean. He made his home in India, where he married and raised a family.

Nicolo’s travels in India itself had been wide-ranging. He knew the ports of the sub-continent, and had also travelled far inland. The great ‘maritime city’ of Calicut was ‘eight miles in circumference, a noble emporium for all India, abounding in pepper, lac [crimson lake], ginger, a larger kind of cinnamon’. Although he was not slow to criticize Indians, describing the practice of suttee in gruesome detail and maintaining that they were ‘much addicted to licentiousness’, he was equally ready to report that they regarded the Franks (Europeans) as arrogant for thinking they excelled all other races in wisdom.

He recounted the scenes of daily life in India, even describing how women arranged their hair, sometimes using false locks, ‘but none paint their faces, with the exception of those who dwell near Cathay’. In Calicut there was fondness for polyandry, with one woman having as many as ten husbands; the men contributed among themselves to the upkeep of the shared wife, and she would allocate her children to the husbands as she thought fit.³

Nicolo’s years of living and travelling in the Indian Ocean lands corresponded precisely with the visits by Zheng He’s fleets, and several of his accounts of local customs closely match those of Ma Huan, the Chinese interpreter. The two describe, almost word for word, the Indian test for guilt or innocence, by which an accused person’s finger was dipped in boiling oil. Like Ma, the Venetian could not refrain from telling how men in Thailand had pellets inserted in their penises; unlike Ma he even dared to explain how this was intended to gratify their womenfolk. The Pope’s secretary dutifully wrote it all down.

Nicolo never referred directly to the Chinese, but his knowledge of them appears in the memoirs of a Spaniard named Pero Tafur, who had encountered him in Egypt. There is a familiar ring of truth when Tafur quotes what Nicolo had told him about vessels in the Red Sea: ‘He described their ships as like great houses, and not fashioned at all like ours. They have ten or twelve sails, and great cisterns of water within, for there the winds are not very strong; and when at sea they have no dread of islands or rocks.’ This is, unmistakably, a description of an ocean-going Chinese junk. When questioned by Poggio the Venetian explained how these giants of the Indian Ocean were made: ‘The lower part is constructed with triple planks. But some ships are built in compartments, so that should one part be shattered, the other part remaining entire they may accomplish the voyage.’

While Nicolo was making his way back to Europe he had dared to join a pilgrimage to Mecca. He seems also to have visited Ethiopia, since he tells of seeing ‘Christians eating the raw flesh of animals’ – a distinctively Ethiopian habit. The last stage of Nicolo’s long journey home was marred by tragedy: in Egypt his Indian wife and their children died, probably from the plague, and he lingered in Cairo for two years, working for the sultan as an interpreter.

As an informant, Nicolo was both practical and entertaining. Being a merchant he could tell Poggio a lot about the cities and trading practices of the Indian Ocean; he also had an eye for local customs. He might even have matched his compatriot Marco Polo as a story-teller, if only fate had given him an amanuensis on a par with Rustichello of Pisa and all the leisure granted by a spell in prison. However, within the constraints imposed by his other duties, Poggio drew out of the Venetian a lively, coherent account of life in the East.

It was two or three years before the papal secretary found time to complete his encyclopaedia, which was written in Latin: what Nicolo had told him was included in Book IV. Copies in both Latin and Italian soon reached Lisbon, where they were closely scrutinized. Soon the Venetian’s memoirs were extracted and distributed separately, under the title India Rediscovered. Some years later, after the invention of printing, they would be published in Portuguese.

The Portuguese went on hunting for every source of information about the Indian Ocean.⁴ One highly-placed friend, and a keen collector of geographical news, was a Florentine banker, Paolo del Pozzo Toscanelli, whose ideas would later influence Christopher Columbus. Since Italy led the way in cartography, it was to there that Lisbon turned for a visual compilation of all that was now known about the East. They wanted to see their own discoveries embodied in this work (without revealing too much to potential rivals), and because their ambitions were boundless they wanted a map not merely of the Indian Ocean and its environs, but of the entire known world: a mappa mundi.

The result of Portuguese curiosity was the making of one of the most intricately ornate maps in existence. The artist was a monk, Brother Mauro, at S. Michele di Murano, a monastery outside Venice. He had been renowned for many years as a physician, mathematician and ‘cosmographer’, but only towards the end of his life did he concentrate upon his masterpiece, the detailed mappa mundi, almost two metres across. Adorned in colour with fanciful paintings of towns and sprinkled with finely-scripted explanatory legends, it is as much a work of art as a piece of cartography, a mélange of true research and medieval imaginings. In some ways, Mauro’s ideas were decidedly old-fashioned: his world, which he portrayed ‘upside down’, with north at the bottom, is depicted as flat and nearly circular, with the sides of the continents following its circumference, yet always enclosed by an outer seas.

The Portuguese paid Brother Mauro’s monastery to hasten the mappa mundi. When the map was finished the original was sent to Lisbon and the monastery kept a copy. (Their intermediary with the papal secretary Poggio had probably been a certain Dom Gomez, head of the Camaldolite Order in Portugal, the very order to which Brother Mauro belonged.)

Naturally, the Portuguese were anxious for any clues as to whether ships might be able round the furthest extremity of Africa, wherever that was. Brother Mauro did not fail them. In the Indian Ocean a junk is depicted, and the legend says: ‘About the year 1420 an Indian vessel, or junk, which was on her way across the Indian Ocean to the Islands of Men and Women, was caught by a storm and carried for 40 days, 2,000 miles, beyond Cavo de Diab to the west and southwest, and when the stress of the weather had subsided, was seventy days in returning to the Cape.’ The source of this vignette, written in a monastery close to Venice in 1459, must surely have been that lately-returned Venetian traveller, Nicolo de’ Conti. In his conversations with Poggio Bracciolini, the Venetian had even talked of the mythical ‘Islands of Men and Women’; following the lead of Marco Polo he said they were near the island of Socotra, off the Hom of Africa.

Mauro’s masterpiece inevitably owes much to Marco Polo. ‘Cathay’ is crowded with exquisitely executed miniature paintings of walled cities, each different from the next, and all conceived as being like cities in Italy. But the map also paid particular attention to Africa. One legend says that he had access to the ‘charts of Portuguese navigators’ (which could only have defined, at the time when he was working, the African coast as far as the Gulf of Guinea). The shape of Africa was almost total guesswork, with the whole continent being inscribed as Ethiopia, except for some western and central parts. Along the east of Africa is a large island called Diab; although this might be taken for Madagascar, the name is never found anywhere else and is possibly a confusion with Dib, the Arab word for the Maldives.

One region was even given over to the Bnichilebs, the ‘dog-faced people’ of classical mythology. On the Nile were the so-called ‘Gates of Iron’, which the Ethiopians were said to open once a year out of the goodness of their hearts, allowing the waters to flood down to Egypt.

Apart from such confusions and remnants of ancient legends, the map was a great advance in thinking about Africa. Foremost was the faith it showed in the possibility of sailing round the end of the continent into the Indian Ocean. Most significant of all, several towns are marked along the eastern seaboard of Africa, including Kilwa and Sofala; never before had a European map borne these names, and as far as is known no European had ever set eyes on them. Who had been Mauro’s source? Most probably Nicolo de’ Conti once again, for those great Indian ports he had lived in, such as Calicut, faced the coast of East Africa.

The Portuguese had every reason to be pleased with their purchase from the monastery of San Michele di Murano. They struck a medal in honour of ‘Frater Mauro, Cosmographus incomparabilis’.⁵ In years to come, simplified copies of his map would be handed to the caravel captains, to check against their discoveries.

FIFTEEN
The Lust for Pepper, the Hunt for Prester John

I gave to this subject six or seven years of great anxiety, explaining, to the best of my ability, how great service might be done to our Lord, by this undertaking, in promulgating his sacred name and our holy faith among so many nations … It was also requisite to refer to the temporal prosperity which was foretold in the writings of so many trustworthy and wise historians, who related that great riches were to be found in these parts.

—Christopher Columbus, in a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain (1499)

AFTES 1481 the pace of Portuguese exploration was transformed, for John II came to the throne in that year. As a sixteen-year-old prince he had exulted in the massacre at Arzila, and ten years later proved implacable in his use of power. At home, John openly challenged the nobles who had bent his weak father to their will. Abroad, he showed himself adroit, especially in improving the old ties with England. Most of all, he ordered that the caravels should once more push boldly into the southern hemisphere. Their captains began charting league upon league of the African coast. Any doubts his courtiers showed were brushed aside.

This confidence was sustained in 1483 when a caravel captained by Diogo Cam reached six degrees south and came to the mouth of a vast river, the Congo. Its waters, pouring down from the African interior, etched a brown pathway far out from the shore, until they grudgingly merged into the Atlantic. It seemed to the Portuguese mariners that the river might offer a route to ‘Ethiopia’ and the Indies, so they set up a stone pillar on a headland, bearing the arms of their homeland. These hopes were foiled by sandbanks and rapids, but Cam did discover a well-organized African kingdom just south of the river. On his second journey to the Congo, in 1485, he bore lavish gifts from King John for King Nzinga Nkuwu, called the Manicongo, with a message of goodwill urging him to embrace Christianity. This pioneering bid for friendship with a non-European monarch might have seemed a portent of what would happen in the Indies: the Manicongo’s son was baptized with the name Afonso, black clerics were trained, and teams of artisans sent out from Lisbon to help Portugal’s new friends. (Significantly, the early promise was not to be fulfilled, for the Congo kingdom was soon ravaged by slave-trading.)

John II’s resolve was equally sustained by a dramatic advance in navigation, which allowed the caravels to work out their latitudes accurately, even when far south of the equator and unable to see the stars of the northern hemisphere.¹ The king had turned for help to Jewish astronomers and mathematicians, especially the famed Professor Abraham Zacuto of Salamanca in Spain. The professor devised tables giving the sun’s maximum altitude on every day of the year at every latitude. These calculations were first written in Hebrew, then translated into Latin and finally into Portuguese as O Regimento do Astrolabio. The king sent his personal physician, Master Joseph, on a voyage to Guinea to test them there; he reported that Zacuto’s figures were frultless.

John II sensed the culminating moment must be at hand, almost seventy years after his great-grandfather, his namesake, had led Portugal into Africa by capturing Ceuta. His methodical mind was already pondering how to treat with a ruler he only knew as the ‘Rajah of Calicut’. A Genoese named Columbus, who was living in Portugal, had come to the Lisbon court in 1484, offering to command a voyage westwards across the Atlantic in search of the Indies. The manner in which he was rejected, making him turn instead to Spain, reflected John II’s confidence that his caravels were nearing success.

The one constant impediment, slowing down progress, was a lack of numbers. Even to man their ships going to the Guinea the Portuguese had been driven to recruit desperadoes from other parts of Europe. Such crews had been equal to their task, for the caravels then only faced black pagans armed with spears and arrows, and gunfire had easily wrought havoc among them. In the Indian Ocean, however, there might well be far more formidable enemies, and the Portuguese would be alone, at the extremity of sea routes stretching back for thousands of stormy leagues.² The Pope was telling John II to ‘take the Ottoman Turks in the rear’. But their conquests in Egypt and Arabia had already brought the Turks close to India; by the 1480s they were advancing along the Black Sea towards Persia, and their performance in the Mediterranean proved that they could use guns at sea as formidably as on land. ‘Taking the Turks in the rear’ was unlikely to be an easy matter.

Having all the odds against them might have driven the Portuguese, so lacking in numbers, to put aside all heroic visions of striking a blow in the East for Christendom. The alternative was to go to the Indies as humble merchants, buying up cargoes of spices wherever the chance arose. Yet such a mundane role was never contemplated by King John, for he was implacably sure that Portugal would not be alone in facing the followers of the ‘false prophet Mohammed’.

Worldly-wise and ruthless, a Renaissance figure whom Machiavelli might well have admired, John II was known to his Portuguese subjects as ‘the Perfect King’. Nevertheless, he was still able to believe implicitly that ‘Prester John’, the fabled priest-king of the East, was waiting eagerly in the Indies to join hands with European Christendom. The Portuguese could put their trust in this legendary figure because the readiness to elevate make-believe above verifiable truth still flourished. Scientific thought counted for less than alchemy, witchcraft or miracles.³

The Prester John story was one of the most persistent fantasies of the Middle Ages, invented to shore up religious morale in a time of frailty, then given new impetus by a literary hoax. The readiness of the ‘Perfect King’ to put his faith in it can only be understood as the culmination of a dream, affecting the course of history. This directly influenced the European seaborne assault on Asia, and to a lesser extent the westwards search leading to the discovery of the New World. There would even be, in the end, a curious vindication.

The origins of the legend can be traced back to a tale about an apocryphal visit to Rome by a ‘Patriarch of the Indians’ spread in 1144 by Hugh of Jabala, a French-born Catholic bishop stationed in the Levant. He told of a ‘priest and king’ named John who dwelt ‘beyond Persia and Armenia in the uttermost East and [who], with all his people, is a Christian but a Nestorian’; this brave ruler had fought and defeated the Persians.

The decisive myth-making came soon after, with the appearance of a ‘Letter from Prester John’ addressed to the Pope, as well as to Emperor Manuel of Constantinople and Emperor Frederick of the Romans. All the evidence suggests it was concocted by an Archbishop Christian of Mainz, who claimed to have translated it from Greek into Latin. A Greek original was never found, and the archbishop may well have hit upon the idea of this pretence during a visit to Constantinople.

A masterpiece of invention, the letter tells of Prester John’s domain, with its crystal waters, great caches of precious stones and forests of pepper trees.⁴ On a mountain of fire, salamanders spin threads for the precious royal garments. Prester John speaks of his beautiful wives, and of how he limits his congress with them to only four times a year; for the rest of the time he sleeps on a ‘cold bed of sapphire’, to subdue his lust.

In a magic mirror outside his palace, says Prester John, he can discern all the intrigues of his enemies. The letter ends in a grandiose biblical vein: ‘If thou canst count the stars of the sky and the sands of the sea, judge the vastness of our realm and our powers.’ Such imagery played upon Europe’s vague notions of the lurking might of Asia.

One defence of Archbishop Christian, if he were indeed the author, is that fictitious letters were an accepted literary device in the Middle Ages. What made the Prester John forgery so much more potent was the desire in Europe, among kings, priests and peasants alike, to hold it as the truth. At a time when the Crusades had begun to falter and all the prayers asking God to intervene on the side of Christianity seemed in vain, it restored faith in the bond between religion and valour. The mysterious presbyter was an oriental counterpart of those bishops who rode into battle with studded maces in their mailed fists. He was also immensely rich, making popes and archbishops see him as a person after their own hearts, spreading a message which could be set against the urgings of Jesus to be poor and humble.

A few brave spirits, such as the philosopher Roger Bacon, were openly sceptical, hinting that the priest-king might not exist. They went unheeded. Soon the letter was being translated from Latin into almost every European language and dialect; there was even a Hebrew version. Then scribes began weaving their own fancies into it. The next stage was the invention of tales by imaginary travellers of visits to the domain of the divine monarch, and even of interviews with him. Naturally enough, all travellers to the East – especially the friars sent to Cathay by the Church – were told to look out for the Prester. They were questioned on their return: did they see him or, at the very least, did they hear about him? Few dared say no.

Marco Polo had embellished the legend in a rather discouraging way, by declaring that Prester John was long since dead, killed by the Mongol leader Chinghiz Khan in ‘one of the greatest battles ever seen’. The Prester himself had been a Mongol, albeit a Christian, and Marco turned him into a somewhat unpleasant figure whose arrogance led to his own downfall; when Chinghiz had politely asked for his daughter as a bride, Prester John replied fiercely that he would rather ‘commit his daughter to the flames’. That had led to the disastrous war. The descendant of Prester John was a king named George, a mere vassal of the Great Khan.

Even if Marco’s account was highly confused, there was a certain historical basis for it, because back in 1141 an immense battle had indeed been fought in the Katwan valley near Samarkand between the followers of a nomad from north China named Yelu Dashi and the army of Sanjur, a Muslim sultan; the opposing sides were reputed to have thrown a total of 400,000 horsemen into the field, and when Yelu Dashi emerged triumphant he went on to capture Samarkand. Although not a Christian, he was supported by the heretical Nestorians and was sympathetic towards them (even calling one of his sons by the suitably warlike name of Elijah). It is likely that Nestorian merchants had brought news of Yelu Dashi’s victory westwards to the Levant, since it was only three years later that Bishop Hugh of Jabala had travelled to Rome and told there how a great victory had been won ‘in the uttermost East’ by a Christian king named John.

If by the start of the fourteenth century Marco Polo had declared Prester John to be dead – and by any rational judgement, he had to be – the time might seem to have arrived for Europe to stop believing in him. On the contrary, his fame was fanned into new life by ‘Sir John Mandeville’, an imaginary English knight whose fictitious memoirs claimed to be an account of thirty-four years spent travelling in the East.

Who wrote the Mandeville text remains an enigma, but it was someone with a talent close to genius. He was possibly an Englishman born in St Albans, north of London, who in about 1350 had fled across the Channel to Liège – another cathedral city – after committing some grave crime. Perhaps he was a dealer in precious stones, for his narrative reveals a compulsive interest in diamonds. His 70,000-word tour de force was written in French a few years before he died in 1372. At his deathbed was a Liège lawyer and fellow-writer, Jean d’Outremeuse, who has sometimes been wrongly named as Mandeville’s creator.

The surname of the fictitious Sir John could have been derived from William de Mandeville, Earl of Essex, a twelfth-century crusader who sailed from England to the Holy Land with a fleet of thirty-seven ships. (While on this expedition he had helped the Portuguese to fight against the Muslims in a battle during which 40,000 men were killed.) But the stratagems by which the Mandeville author hid his own identity scarcely matter beside the impact of his work on all levels of European society for several centuries. He was not recognized for what he was – a brilliant confidence-trickster who had pillaged the memoirs of many real travellers, Marco Polo among them – but was revered as a trustworthy witness to the world’s wonders.

Mandeville’s Travels was destined to be the first book ever printed in Europe in a language other than Latin, when a Dutch version came out in 1470; by 1500 at least twenty-five editions had appeared. Part of the narrative’s success derived from its grotesque stories, sometimes with a sexual element; even the familiar Roman and medieval tales of lands where husbands invite other men to lie with their wives are worked over once more. This was the kind of earthy secular writing which the Church condemned yet never quite managed to outlaw. The author knew how to forestall religious criticism: as the climax of his story, readers are introduced to the country of Prester John, most virtuous of Christian monarchs.

The writer of the original Prester John letter had motives easy to understand. He wanted to tell the beleaguered Christians of Europe that they were not alone, that succour might be at hand. The motives of whoever called himself Sir John Mandeville are more intriguing, for there was small prospect of financial reward. Perhaps he was merely an ‘armchair traveller’, amusing himself in his last days by drawing together the favourite tales of a lifetime’s reading. Indeed, his closing sentences are distinctly plaintive, talking of ‘rheumatic gouts’ and of ‘taking comfort in wretched rest’. He ends by asking his readers to pray for him; then he will pray for them. If within the work there lies some religious or political motive, it is hard to discern across a gulf of six centuries.

Had he lived to see it, the Mandeville author would have marvelled at the huge and lasting success of his travelogue. One sure result was to sustain the Prester John myth in the minds of those European powers, and in particular, the Portuguese, who were looking for new routes to the Indian Ocean lands of pepper, spices and jewels. To find the priest-king would be a service to God, while acquiring earthly wealth. Thus a medieval legend was destined to buttress the needs of the Age of Discovery: even Columbus, crossing the Atlantic in search of Cipango (Japan) and the land of the Great Khan, had carefully studied Mandeville. It is unlikely, however, that Columbus really expected to meet Prester John, if only because Mandeville had moved the priest-king westwards from where Marco Polo had placed him to become the ‘great emperor of India’. Moreover, the name of the elusive monarch was no longer seen as belonging to an individual; that would strain gullibility too far.

So ‘Prester John’ became a title, for bestowal upon the ruler of any suitable Christian kingdom discovered in the East. The name was used in precisely such a way in the Mandeville story: ‘This emperor, Prester John, takes always to wife the daughter of the Great Khan; and the Great Khan also in the same wise the daughter of Prester John. For they two are the greatest lords under the firmament.’ (It demonstrates Europe’s ignorance of events in Asia that the writer seemed unaware that the Mongols, whose ruler was the ‘Great Khan’, had fallen from power almost a century before he was writing.)

As early as 1306, when the Mandeville author had yet to put pen to paper, one scholar had already pointed to Ethiopia as the kingdom of Prester John. It happened because of a remarkable visit to Europe by a thirty-strong Ethiopian delegation sent to the Pope and ‘the King of the Spains’ to seek help against the Muslims. Spain may have been chosen from all the European countries because there was an active Catalan trading station in Alexandria, as well as an Orthodox patriarch who traditionally appointed the head of the Ethiopian Church. If Spanish aid were forthcoming, said the Ethiopians, they were ready to join in a war against the infidels.

The mission apparently gained little, apart from expressions of friendship; but on their way home from Rome and Avignon, where they had been received by Pope Clement V, the Ethiopians were delayed in Genoa by bad weather. A learned priest, Giovanni da Carignano, took the chance to interrogate these strangers, whose looks were so unfamiliar. Being a cartographer, he was keen to learn all he could about the geography of Ethiopia, as well as its customs and religious rites. The Ethiopian king, according to Father Giovanni, was Prester John. Since the visitors would never have called their own king Prester John (his name was Wedem Ar’ad), the title must have been bestowed by Giovanni; since the Prester was by then regarded as being in India, and Ethiopia was commonly called Middle India, this was a reasonable assumption.

Another priest who decided to place the legendary Christian king in India was a Dominican named Jordanus, from the town of Sévérac in southern France. His life-story is obscure, but by his own account he made two hazardous journeys to the East in the early part of the fourteenth century and was granted the title by his religious order of ‘Bishop of Columbum in India the Greater’. (‘Greater India’ was probably seen by Jordanus as embracing South India, Sri Lanka and Thailand; Columbum was the port of Quilon, near Calicut.)

There were Christian communities in southern India, reputedly dating back to the time of St Thomas; the saint is said to have gone to India in A.D. 52 to spread the Gospel and eventually died there. Jordanus was being sent to cajole these wayward believers towards Roman orthodoxy, as well as to win new converts. All the evidence suggests that he made little headway; moreover, although the stories of Prester John and St Thomas had often become tangled together, the adventurous Dominican had been disappointed to find no trace at all of the Christian emperor in India the Greater.

The answer lay elsewhere, and on his return home Jordanus pointed confidently to Ethiopia. While not claiming to have visited their country, the friar had been in ‘Greater Arabia’, where he had learned that the Ethiopians were ‘all Christians, but heretics’. He had a fondness for monsters: ‘Of Aethiopia, I say that it is a very great land, and very hot. There are many monsters there, such as gryphons that guard the golden mountains … The lord of that country I believe to be more potent than any man in the world, and richer in gold and silver and in precious stones. He is said to have under him 52 kings.’ Jordanus also offered a description of East Africa, which he called ‘India Tertia’: it was inhabited by dragons breathing fire, unicorns so fierce that they could kill an elephant, and ‘black, short, fat men’.⁶

What Jordanus said about Ethiopia in 1330 marked a decisive stage in relating the legend to a semblance of truth. The friar had almost certainly been helped in his travels by Genoese merchants, and a 1339 map drawn by Angellino da Dalorto, a Genoese, said that the Muslims of Nubia were ‘warring continuously with the Christians of Nubia and Ethiopia, who are ruled by Prester John, a black Christian’.

At last, the kingdom of Prester John, having been sought all across Asia, had come to rest in Africa. While the reality might be far more humble than three centuries of grandiose exaggeration, it was enough to bear Portuguese piety and commercial enterprise along upon the same optimistic wind.

By the fifteenth century there was a small colony of Europeans living in Ethiopia. Almost all were Italians, mainly from Venice, Florence and Genoa. Some had gone to the ‘land of Prester John’ in the hope of acquiring precious stones; others may have become stranded while trying to reach the Indian Ocean by way of the Nile and the Red Sea. One of the earliest visitors whose name has survived is Pietro Rambulo, sometimes referred to as ‘Pietro di Napoli’ (he actually came from Messina, in Sicily, then part of the state of Naples). Rambulo reached Ethiopia in 1407 as a young man, took a local wife soon afterwards, and lived there for forty years.

His influence upon relations between Europe and his adopted home were to be considerable, as first appeared in 1428 when an Ethiopian mission reached Alfonso V of Aragon. The decision by the Ethiopians once again to approach a Spanish ruler, as they had in 1306, was most probably due to lobbying by Rambulo, because Alfonso held Sicily and was on the point of acquiring Naples as well. The emissaries proposed on behalf of Yishaq, the king who had sent them, that the two royal families should be united by marriage: Alfonso should send one of his sons to marry an Ethiopian princess, and an Ethiopian prince would be married to a daughter of Alfonso. The king side-stepped this proposition, but did agree to supply a team of artisans (who all died on the way).

Two years later Rambulo is recorded as accompanying a delegation sent to Ethiopia by the Due de Berry, who had Spanish connections. In 1432 Rambulo halted near Constantinople, and there met the Burgundian traveller Bertrandon de la Brocquière. Since his companions on the delegations had died, Rambulo was doubtless hoping to recruit at least one extra European to present to the Ethiopian monarch. So he ‘made many efforts’ to induce la Brocquière to come with him to Axum, the Ethiopian capital. Although the Burgundian remarks in his memoirs that he had met Rambulo before (without saying where), he also speaks deprecatingly of the fondness of ‘Pietro di Napoli’ for concocting outrageous stories, such as the Ethiopian scheme to divert the Nile and starve out Egypt. Pietro’s offer was turned down.

The failure of the mission to Spain did not seem to lower Rambulo’s standing with Zara-Yacob, the new emperor of Ethiopia, for his next diplomatic mission was to India and China. In 1450 he was again despatched to Europe, with an Ethiopian envoy named Brother Michele, and after a gap of twenty years was once more received in audience by Alfonso of Aragon.

Rambulo now took the opportunity to visit his birthplace. In Naples he was interviewed by a Dominican monk, who wrote down a brief account of the career of this intriguing character. The monk describes Rambulo as being tall, tanned by the sun, handsomely attired and white-haired. This is the last glimpse of him that history affords.

The good fortune of Rambulo had been that he was often allowed out of Ethiopia, whereas other foreigners who came there were not: Zara-Yacob treated them well, giving them wives and land, but refused to let them leave. He may have feared that while on the road they would be captured and tortured by the Muslims to extract information useful in war. Escape for his ‘prisoners’ was impossible, since there was only one route out, northwards to the Red Sea port of Massawa, and that was both hazardous and well guarded.

Such facts as the Portuguese had collected about the country were fragmentary enough to let them cling to the Mandeville fantasies of Prester John’s invincibility: ‘This emperor, when he goes into battle against any other lord, has no banners borne before him; but he has three large crosses of gold full of precious stones; and each cross is set in a chariot richly arrayed. And to keep each cross are appointed ten thousand men of arms and more than one hundred thousand footmen.’

Undeterred by the dangers, several Franciscan missionaries now managed to reach Ethiopia and make their way to the king’s court. Although one Venetian friar who wrote an account of the trip felt obliged to talk of ‘the great king Prester John’, his opinion of Ethiopia was decidedly low:

This country has much gold, little grain, and lacks wine; it has a very large population, a brutish people, rough and uncultured. They have no steel weapons for combat. Their arrows and spears are of cane. The king would not take the field with a force of less than 200,000 or 300,000 people. Each year he fights for the faith. He does not pay any of those who take the field, but he provides their living and exempts these warriors from every royal taxation. And all these warriors are chosen, inscribed and branded on the arm with the royal seal. No one wears woollen clothes because they have none, but instead they wear linen. All, both men and women, go naked from the waist upwards and barefoot; they are always full of lice. They are a weak people with little energy or application, but proud.

Had he read them, these contemptuous judgements would have enraged Zara-Yacob, the most powerful Ethiopian ruler in the fifteenth century, since he was expanding his domains by driving the Muslims back towards the Red Sea. Zara-Yacob was also brandishing at Egypt the wildly improbable but oft-repeated threat that he would divert the course of the Blue Nile. In a letter to Cairo in 1443, he warned Sultan Jamaq that he could do so at that very instant; only his fear of God and reluctance to cause human suffering held him back.

Zara-Yacob was annoyed on hearing that Europeans were calling him Prester John, remarking that he had a perfectly good name already, meaning ‘Seed of Jacob’. The emperor also conceded nothing in terms of piety: his subjects were ordered to have the renunciation of the devil tattooed on their forehead, and any who demurred were beheaded.

How much the Portuguese knew of such matters is uncertain. There was quite enough to convince them, however, that Prester John really did exist The exact position of his Ethiopian kingdom remained obscure, but it would surely be a place of succour on the way to India. All caravel captains had orders to seek news of this Christian king wherever they stepped ashore in Africa. Since on Brother Mauro’s map almost all of the continent had been delineated as Ethiopia, dotted with imaginary cities and fanciful drawings, the court in Lisbon started thinking of ways to collect more precise information.

SIXTEEN
The Spy Who Never Came Home

So geographers, in Afric maps,

With savage pictures fill their gaps,

And o’er unhabitable downs,

Place elephants for want of towns.

—Jonathan Swift, ‘On Poetry, a Rhapsody’ (1733)

DURING THE AUTUMN OF 1487, two Moroccan merchants lay ill with fever in the Egyptian port of Alexandria. Their deaths seemed so certain that the city governor did not bother to wait on the event, but exercised his right to confiscate their possessions. To his dismay the Moroccans recovered. They reclaimed their goods, including numerous jars of Neapolitan honey, then hurried off to Cairo.

This had been an unpromising start to what was to become one of the most spectacular feats in the history of espionage. The two men were neither Moroccans nor merchants, but agents of the Portuguese government. Their orders were to spy out the ports of the Indian Ocean, investigate the routes by which pepper and other spices reached the Mediterranean, and make contact with ‘Prester John’, ruler of Ethiopia. The senior of the two agents, named Pêro de Covilham (sometimes written Covilhã or Covilhão), had been given a chart on which he was ordered to note down everything the two managed to learn about navigation in the Indian Ocean.¹ In particular, he had been told to find out whatever the Arab and Indian sea-captains might know about a route round the southern tip of Africa.

On the day of their departure, Covilham and his companion, Afonso de Paiva, had been assured by the Portuguese king, John II, that he knew they were embarking on a ‘difficult mission’. This was an understatement. Although both spoke Arabic, were using Muslim names, and had assumed the appearance of itinerant merchants, the price of having their identities discovered would almost certainly be death; the best they could hope for, if they were found out, would be enslavement. To ensure they had perfected their new roles they took time over the journey from Portugal to Egypt, by way of Valencia, Barcelona. Naples and Rhodes, where they boarded a ship for Alexandria with their jars of honey.

From that moment on there was no way of sending messages back to Lisbon, other than risking the use of a slow and uncertain courier system maintained between Jewish merchants in Europe and their compatriots in the lands of the East. There was a large Jewish community in Cairo, which had been the foremost city in the Muslim world until Constantinople was captured by the Turks some thirty-five years earlier; it was to Cairo that Covilham and Paiva planned to return when their work was complete. Now their aim was to travel up the Nile, cross to the Red Sea with a trading caravan, then take a boat down to Aden at the entrance to the Indian Ocean.

Selling honey as they went, they reached Aden safely in August 1488, and there agreed to part. They would never see one another again, and neither would return to Portugal. Paiva crossed over to the port of Zeila on the African mainland, to make his way into Ethiopia. This was a hazardous route for a Christian disguised as a Muslim, since it went through territory occupied by the Arab armies who were confronting the Ethiopians in their mountain fastnesses.

Now on his own, Covilham booked his place in one of the hundreds of small Arab dhows leaving at that season from Aden to India, with the south-west monsoon in their sails. This was to be the first of a series of journeys that would last more than two years, as Covilham repeatedly criss-crossed the Indian Ocean, furtively making notes on the chart he kept in his baggage.

Behind him lay a career in espionage and diplomacy which made him a natural choice for such a venture. By now in his late thirties, he had risen from poverty to be a knight in the royal household. His birthplace, from which he took his name, was the mountain town of Covilham, close to the border with Spain. In his youth he had served in the court of the Castilian duke of Medina Sidonia, but returned to Portugal in 1474. A natural linguist, he accompanied King Afonso V on a visit to France, and so impressed his superiors that he was sent back to France on his first espionage mission. One of his contemporaries described him as ‘a man of great wit and intelligence’, and a vivid raconteur. Covilham was taken up by John II, who sent him to Morocco as an ambassador. There his task was to negotiate with the sultan of Fez for the return to Portugal of the bones of the ‘martyr’ Prince Fernando, who had died in a Moroccan dungeon after being captured at Tangier in 1437. This spell in Morocco allowed Covilham to master Arabic and study the Islamic way of life.

What had especially endeared Covilham to the new king was the work he next carried out; he was sent to Castile to keep an eye on the activities of the fugitive Braganza family.² As a chronicler put it, John II wanted Covilham to ‘spie out who were those gentlemen of his subjects which practised there against him’. The hatreds around the throne at the time were intense, for the king had ordered the execution of his cousin the Duke of Braganza for plotting, and had personally stabbed to death another disloyal duke, notwithstanding that he was the queen’s brother. Amid this royal blood-letting, Covilham always stayed true to the king.

The decision to send spies to the East had been taken early in 1487, and simultaneously three caravels were being prepared for a decisive effort to reach the southern end of Africa and find a way into the Indian Ocean. This was the culmination of seventy years of Portuguese effort, during which geography had proved a far more frustrating obstacle than could ever have been imagined by the long-dead Prince Henry. Already the voyages of exploration went as far beyond the equator as Portugal was to the north of it, yet still the African coastline ran due south.

The Portuguese captains continued to put up stone pillars, surmounted by crosses, on prominent headlands. These landmarks in the unknown were reassurances to the men who came by on subsequent voyages, and challenged them to go further. The captains were always anxious about the moods of their crews, in cramped and comfortless ships amid stormy seas. The greater the distance from Europe, the greater the risk of mutiny. Superstitious sailors feared they might sail off the end of the world into oblivion.

The tested and resourceful captain chosen to lead the three caravels to the end of Africa was Bartolomeu Dias. Although Covilham must have known him, or at least have heard of his plans, there is little likelihood that they would have discussed the chance of meeting somewhere in the Indian Ocean during their respective journeys. With success seemingly so close, and fears of Spain’s jealous rivalry so strong, few confidences were exchanged in Lisbon during the fifteenth century’s closing decades.

The small group who gave Covilham and Paiva their final instructions met in ‘great secrecy’ in the house of an aristocrat, Pêro de Alcacova. Present were the future king, Manuel, then Duke of Beja, and two Jewish ‘master doctors’, Moses and Roderigo. One of these was a royal physician, and both were renowned cosmographers. The importance plainly being attached to the covert expedition shows how the Portuguese still feared there were unknown hazards which might yet snatch away success. The orders to make contact with ‘Prester John’ equally reflected the hope of forging an alliance with a friendly monarch whose ports could offer safe havens to the Portuguese caravels.

Seemingly never in doubt was the prospect of ‘breaking through’ to the Indian Ocean. The two cosmographers told Covilham that they had found a document (nothing more is said about it) regarding the passage between the Indian Ocean and the Atlantic. The existence of Sofala, the southernmost port on the eastern coast of Africa, was by now well known – although it had never been seen or described by any European – and that was one of the places Covilham knew he must visit in due course.

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