The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (6 page)

Marinid Mosque at Mansura near Tlemcen

Photo by the Author

The Old City of Tangier.

Photo by the Author.

The Almohad sultans, however, proved incapable of managing such an enormous territory for long. Early in the thirteenth century the political edifice began to come apart amid economic decline, religious quarrels, and countryside rebellions. In northern Iberia Christian kingdoms, which until then had existed in the shadow of Muslim civilization, took the offensive. The victory of the combined forces of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal over an Almohad army at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 was the first of a succession of spectacular Christian advances against Muslim territory. One by one the great Muslim cities fell, Cordova in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248. By mid century the Almohads were all but driven from Iberia, and all that remained of Muslim power on the northern side of the strait was the mountainous kingdom of Granada. In North Africa the Almohad state split into three smaller kingdoms, one in the Ifriqiya (the eastern Maghrib, today Tunisia and eastern Algeria) ruled by the Hafsid dynasty; a second in the Central Maghrib governed by the ’Abd al-Wadids; and a third in Morocco under a nomadic warrior tribe of Berber nomads known as the Banu Marin, or the Marinids.

Rough and ready cavalrymen with no guiding ideology, the Marinids overthrew the last of the Almohad rulers, established a new dynastic capital at Fez, and restored a measure of political stability to Morocco in the last quarter of the thirteenth century. From the start the new sultans harbored dreams of resurrecting the Mediterranean empire of their predecessors, and with this in mind repeatedly waged war against the ’Abd al-Wadids and the Hafsids, their neighbors to the east. Some of the Marinid kings mounted seaborne campaigns against the Iberian coast, but none of these invasions seriously threatened the Christian hold on the interior of the peninsula. In any event the Moroccans were obliged to pursue an active policy in the region of the strait, which was far too important strategically to be given up to the Christian states without a struggle.

The contest, however, was no simple matter of Islam versus Christianity. The battle of faiths that had dominated the decades of the Almohad retreat was losing some of its emotional ferocity, and a relatively stable balance of power was emerging among six successor states. Four of them were Muslim — the Marinids, the
’Abd al-Wadids, the Hafsids, and the Nasrids, who ruled Granada after 1230. The other two were Christian — Castile and Aragon–Catalonia. From the later thirteenth through the following century these six kingdoms competed in peace and war with little regard to matters of religion, which served mainly as ideological cover for utterly pragmatic political or military undertakings.

War and peace in the Strait of Gibraltar converged on the five principal towns which faced it — Tarifa, Algeciras, and Gibraltar on the European side, Ceuta and Tangier on the African. These ports were the entrepôts of trade between the continents, the embarkation points for warriors on crusade, and the bases for galleys which patrolled the channel. In the later thirteenth and the fourteenth centuries they were the objects of incessant military rivalry among the kings of the region. Algeciras, for example, was ceded by Granada to the Marinids in 1275, returned to Granada in 1294, taken again by Morocco in 1333, and finally seized by Castile in 1344. Indeed, Tangier was the only one of the ports to retain the same political masters throughout this period, following the Marinid occupation in 1275. Part of the reason was that in the politics of the strait, Tangier was, relatively speaking, the least important of the five cities. The others all fronted the narrow easterly end of the channel and were vital to the trade and communication of the western Mediterranean. But Tangier, lying far off to the southwest and almost facing the Atlantic, was a prize of lesser magnitude. It would be the fortune of Portugal, an Atlantic power, to wrest the city from Moroccan control, but not until 1471.

Still, Tangier was of considerable strategic value. The lovely bay, whose white beaches curve off to the northeast of the city, was the only natural indentation of any size on the entire coast of Morocco, and it could easily shelter a fleet of warships. Along with Ceuta (Sabta) and some lesser towns on the strait, Tangier had for several centuries served as a point of embarkation for naval and cargo vessels bound for Iberia. In 1279 Sultan Abu Yusuf, founder of the Marinid dynasty, supervised the massing of a fleet of 72 galleys in the bay in order to send troops to relieve a Castilian siege of Algeciras.
³
Aside from the recurrent movement of Marinid troops, horses, and matériel through the port, the city also played host to numerous bands of Muslim pirates, who harassed shipping in the strait and made raids on the Spanish
Coast.
⁴
The hazardous and uncertain condition of interstate affairs no doubt stimulated the Tangierian economy and gave the population ample employment building ships, running cargos, hiring out as soldiers and seamen, and trafficking in arms and supplies. Short of a Christian attack, the city had little to lose and much to gain from the prevailing conditions of war and diplomacy in the region.

If the continuing prosperity of the city in the aftermath of the Almohad collapse resulted partly from the vigorous efforts of the Marinids to check the
reconquista
, even more important were developments in trade and seaborne technology. In the course of the Christian crusades to Palestine between the eleventh and the end of the thirteenth centuries, European long-distance shipping took almost full command of the Mediterranean. This was the first great age of Europe’s economic development, and although trade between Christian and Muslim states grew by leaps, virtually all of it was carried in Latin vessels. In the western sea the Genoese took the lead, signing a commercial treaty with the Almohads in 1137–38 and thereafter opening up trade with a number of Maghribi ports, including Ceuta, and possibly Tangier, in the 1160s.
⁵
Merchants of Catalonia, operating principally from Barcelona and protected by the rising power of the kings of Aragon, extended their commercial operations to North Africa by the early 1200s. Traders from Marseille, Majorca, Venice, and Pisa also joined in the competition, offering grain, wine, hardware, spices, and weaponry, plus cotton, woolen, and linen textiles in return for the wool, hides, leather, wax, alum, grain, and oil of North Africa and the gold, ivory, and slaves of the lands beyond the Sahara.

With commercial traffic in the western Mediterranean growing continually in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was only a matter of time before it would spill through the strait into the Atlantic. The Genoese, Catalans, Provençals, and Venetians were all established in the towns of the strait in the 1300s. But there were strong incentives to go further. To the south lay the Atlantic ports of Morocco and the prospect not only of expanding the Maghribi trade but of diverting some of the gold brought up from West Africa before it reached the Mediterranean outlets. By the later twelfth century Genoese vessels were already sailing beyond Tangier, round the northwestern tip of Africa, and down the coast to Salé, Safi, and other Moroccan ports. In 1291 the intrepid
Vivaldi brothers of Genoa vanished into
terra incognita
after setting sail down the coast of Morocco, bound for India two centuries too soon.
⁶

It was also after 1275 that Genoese merchants began sailing northwestward from the strait around the great bulge of Iberia and into the waters of the North Atlantic. By 1300 both Genoese and Venetian galleys were making regular trips to ports in England and Flanders, carrying goods from all the Mediterranean lands and returning with woolens, timber, and other products of northern Europe. Here was occurring the great maritime link-up between the ocean and the sea that would weigh so much in the transformation of Europe in the later Middle Ages.

The invasion of the Atlantic by Mediterranean shipping made the Strait of Gibraltar of even greater strategic importance than it had been earlier and gave the cities along its shore a new surge of commercial vitality. Ceuta was the busiest and most prosperous of the towns on either side of the channel in the early fourteenth century.
⁷
But Tangier, which lay along the southwesterly route from the strait to the ports of Atlantic Morocco, had its share of the new shipping traffic.
⁸
In fair weather months vessels from Genoa, Catalonia, Pisa, Marseille, and Majorca might all be seen in Tangier bay — slender galleys which sat low on the surface of the water and maneuvered close to shore under the power of their oarsmen; high-sided round ships with their great triangular sails; and, perhaps occasionally after 1300, tubby-looking, square-rigged cogs from some port on the Atlantic coast of Portugal or Spain. And in addition to these, a swarm of Muslim vessels put out from the harbor to “tramp” the Maghribi coast, shuttle cargo to Iberian ports, or fish the waters of the strait. The movement of Christian merchants and sailors in and out of the town must have been a matter of regular occurrence. And in normal times these visitors mixed freely with the local Muslim population to exchange news and haggle over prices.

Tangier was indeed a frontier town in the early fourteenth century. With rough Berber soldiers tramping through the steep streets to their warships, Christian and Muslim traders jostling one another on the wharves and in the warehouses, pirates disposing of their plunder in the bazaar, the city imaged the roisterous frontier excitement of the times. Perched on the western edge of the Muslim world and caught up in the changing patterns of trade and power in the Mediterranean basin, it was a more restless and
cosmopolitan city than it had ever been before. It was the sort of place where a young man might grow up and develop an urge to travel.

In the narrative of his world adventures Ibn Battuta tells us virtually nothing of his early life in Tangier. From Ibn Juzayy, the Andalusian scholar who composed and edited the
Rihla
, or from Ibn Battuta himself in the most off-hand way, we learn that he was named Abu ’Abdallah Muhammad ibn ’Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati ibn Battuta on 25 February 1304; that his family was descended from the Berber tribe known as the Lawata; that his mother and father were still alive when he left Morocco in 1325; and that some members of his extended family besides himself were schooled in Islamic law and had pursued careers as legal scholars (
faqihs
) or judges (
qadis
). Beyond these skimpy facts, we know only what the
Rihla
reveals to us by implication: that he received the best education in law and the other Islamic sciences that Tangier could provide and that during his adolescent years he acquired an educated man’s values and sensibilities.

His family obviously enjoyed respectable standing as members of the city’s scholarly elite. Tangier was not a chief center of learning in fourteenth-century North Africa; it was not a Fez, a Tlemcen, or a Tunis. When Ibn Battuta was growing up, it did not yet possess one of the
madrasas
, or colleges of higher learning, which the new Marinid rulers had begun founding in their capital.
⁹
But Tangier, like any city of commerce in the Islamic world, required literate families who specialized in providing a variety of skills and services: the officers of mosques and other pious foundations, administrative and customs officials, scribes, accountants, notaries, legal counsellors, and judges, as well as teachers and professors for the sons of the affluent families of merchants and landowners.

The education Ibn Battuta received was one worthy of a member of a legal family. It is easy enough to imagine the young boy, eager and affable as he would be in adult life, marching off to Qur’anic school in the neighborhood mosque to have the teacher beat the Sacred Book into him until, by the age of twelve at least, he had it all committed to memory. The education of most boys would go no further than this Qur’anic training, plus perhaps a smattering of caligraphy, grammar, and arithmetic. But a lad of Ibn Battuta’s family status would be encouraged to move on to
advanced study of the religious sciences: Qur’anic exegesis, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad
(hadith
), grammar, rhetoric, theology, logic, and law. The foremost scholar-teachers of the city offered courses in mosques or their own homes. Students might normally attend the lectures of a number of different men, sitting in a semi-circle at the master’s feet as he read from learned texts and discoursed on their meaning.

The pupil’s task was not simply to grasp the substance of a text but to learn it by heart. The memorization of standard and classical texts comprising the corpus of Islamic knowledge was central to all advanced education. The most respected masters in any field of learning were the people who had not only committed to memory and thoroughly understood the greatest number of books, but who could recall and recite passages from them with ease in scholarly discourse and debate. According to Ibn Khaldun, the great philosopher and historian of the later fourteenth century, memory training was even more rigorously pursued in Moroccan education than in other parts of the Muslim world.
¹⁰
The purpose of education in the Islamic Middle Period, it should be understood, was not to teach students to think critically about their human or natural environment or to push the frontiers of knowledge beyond the limits of their elders. Rather it was to transmit to the coming generation the spiritual truths, moral values, and social rules of the past which, after all, Muslims had found valid by the astonishing success of their faith and civilization. Education was in every sense conservative.