Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (2 page)

I bought a Yemeni history I had come for; and, as an afterthought, picked up the
Travels
, not suspecting that I had set the course of my life into its own middle age.

That afternoon I opened the
Travels
with that slight thrill of anticipation, of a book to be explored greedily, and alone. I turned first to the section on Yemen, to find out what IB had to say about my adoptive home, and was soon into his description of lunch with the Sultan. The doorbell rang. I swore, but pulled the rope that opens the door down on the street. A minute later Hasan appeared, breathless from the climb.

Hasan is one of the few people I enjoy being disturbed by. An afternoon with him will touch on many topics, always interleaved with jokes, few of them repeatable and fewer translatable. He asked what I was reading, and I passed him the
Travels
. Arabic is a language of recitation, and he began reading aloud, as he often does, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time: ‘“
Account of the Sultan of Yemen
. He is the Sultan al-Mujahid Nur al-Din Ali, son of the Sultan al-Mu’ayyad Hizabr al-Din Da’ud, son of al-Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ali ibn Rasul.”’

Suddenly, Hasan stopped and looked up. ‘That’s funny. You know who Sultan al-Mujahid is, don’t you?’

‘You’ve just told me. He was the Sultan of Yemen. IB had lunch with him.’

‘No, the point is … our family, Bayt al-Shamahi, we’re a section of Bayt al-Mujahid. Sultan al-Mujahid is my ancestor. My direct paternal ancestor.’

For a moment, I felt a strange sensation. Perhaps I could call it temporal vertigo: the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap. I think Hasan felt it too.

When he left after sunset, he borrowed the book. My glimpse into IB’s world had been brief; but it had waited 650 years and could wait a week or two more. As for that temporal glitch, it was something that would return when I came to explore that world on the ground.

*

I have always been conscious of the nearness of time past. It may be the result of coming from an elderly family. My childhood was inhabited by Edwardian aunts who wore their hair in vestigial bobs and said ‘orf’. My youngest grandparent, the only one I knew, was born a little before the moving picture. My maternal grandfather
dated
back to the year in which cricketers were permitted to bowl overarm.

From an early age, I was conscious too of an even more distant past. As a toddler, I would stray on to the founder of Pennsylvania’s father, who lay under a slab in front of our pew in church, and try to wake up the fifteenth-century merchant whose effigy slept in a recess in the wall behind. I cannot remember ever being bored. Who could be, in that light-dappled forest of columns? I would sit there and look upwards, and lose myself in its sheer oldness.

Although I didn’t know it at the time, our parish church was anything but parochial. In about 1325, the year in which IB set out from his home town of Tangier, a pious inhabitant of my own native city decided to give the church of St Mary Redcliffe a new north porch. The plan of the building, a hexagon, was unusual. The doorway, though, was a fit of eccentricity: cusped and sub-cusped like the mouth of some toothy sea creature, it sprouts a deep undergrowth of foliage from which small figures peep. Pevsner called the structure ‘desperately original’ and ‘curiously tropical’, and suggested that it might be ‘the first case of
orientalisme
in major Western architecture’. I have shown a photograph of the door to several architectural historians. All but one (she recognized it) have transported it eastwards: prayer niche? some influence from metalwork – Mosul perhaps? Mongol Persia? Islamic India? The porch is truly ectopic, a sort of medieval Brighton Pavilion. But perhaps the outlandishness is not misplaced: the shrine which the porch once contained was a favourite place for travellers to offer prayers, before setting sail a few yards away from the busiest quay in England and, by the grace of God, when they returned. And whatever inspired the design, its date - and that of IB’s departure – could hardly be more apt: the first half of the fourteenth century was one of those rare periods when everything was in motion. Writing at the other end of the world in 1350, the Chinese scholar Wang Li said in his
Unicorn Plain Essays
, ‘He who travelled 1,000
li
[about 200 miles], it was as if he had walked across the courtyard; he who travelled 10,000
li
, as if he had gone to his neighbour’s house.’ For a few decades – IB’s decades – the world seemed to have contracted.

The Crusades were over, the Tatars tamed and Islamized, and the world by and large made not war but love, or at least nuptial alliances. The Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose father and predecessor had begun his career as a Kipchak Turkish slave, was romantically attached to the young Tatar Ilkhan of Iraq and Persia – a descendant of Genghis Khan and thus a cousin of the Yuan Emperor of China – and married to another cousin of the Ilkhan, a daughter of the Khan of the Golden Horde, the latter being married to the Emperor of Byzantium’s daughter, one of whose illegitimate stepsisters was Empress of Trebizond and two of whose legitimate stepsisters, the daughters of Anne of Savoy, were married respectively to a Bulgarian prince and a nobleman of Genoa, and whose stepmother was a daughter of Duke Henry the Wonderful of Brunswick.

Marriages were made, and so was money. The east–west road streamed with merchants. Pegolotti, a Florentine merchant banker who compiled a businessman’s guide to the east in the 1340s, assured his readers that the road to China could be travelled in perfect safety. Under his checklist of ‘Things needful for merchants who desire to make the journey to Cathay’, he stressed the importance of a good dragoman, warning that ‘you must not try to save money in the matter of dragomen by taking a bad one instead of a good one’. But his chief priority concerned the shibboleth of shaving: ‘In the first place, you must let your beard grow long.’ (During the Crusades, Franks and Muslims had learned that they had much in common. One point of complete incompatibility, however, was the question of which end of yourself you should shave. ‘The Franks shave their beards’, wrote one Muslim commentator, ‘and only let a nasty, rough stubble grow. One of them was asked about this and said, “Hair is an excrescence. You Muslims remove it from your crotches, so why should we leave it on our faces?”’)

Just as peace made in-laws of far-flung dynasties, so it brought about some exogamous marriages in the world of design and technology. One of these has rarely been matched in fertility. For centuries, Persian potters had been using cobalt to paint underglaze blue decorations. In the early fourteenth century, some bright entrepreneur had the idea of taking it to China. The Chinese potters tried out this ‘Muhammadan blue’ on their highly prized white porcelain, and in about 1325 started to export the barbarous results back to the Near East. The shapes were based on those of Islamic metalwork, the blue decorations incorporated jolly chinoiseries. Soon, imitations were being made in Persia, then in Egypt and Syria. Later on, the Ottomans took blue-and-white to heart and put tulips on their pots; the seventeenth-century Dutch then fell in love with it, putting windmills and armorials on their pots, and tulips in them. The bastard transfer-printed descendants of blue-and-white still leave Stoke-on-Trent in their willow-patterned millions.

The early decades of the fourteenth century were a period of toings and froings such as had not been seen since ancient times. With the world in such a confusion of currents, it was not so surprising that
a
piece of exotic jetsam like the porch of my parish church should land up in an English port city.

*

It was into this world that the 21-year-old IB launched himself: ‘I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests.’ Hasan having returned the
Travels
, I launched myself with him.

It was a world of miracles and mundanities, of sultans, scholars, saints and slave-girls, in which outrageous fortune and dubious dragomen – the sort Pegolotti warned against – steered a course that lurched between luxury and poverty, asceticism and hedonism. IB, I discovered, had a penchant for the picaresque and a storyteller’s delight in close shaves, honed along the way by constant recounting in princely courts and caravanserais. He escaped pirates, storms and shipwrecks; he dodged the Black Death, purged himself of a fever with an infusion of tamarinds, survived the near-fatal consequences of undercooked yams and endured diarrhoea caused by a binge on melons; he worked for the Sultan of Delhi – ‘of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood’, who had bumped off his father in a Buster Keaton-style collapsing pavilion operated by elephants – and lived to tell the tale.

Twenty-nine years after he flew the nest, IB returned to Morocco. He had seen a huge swathe of the known world, visiting over forty countries on the modern map and travelling some 75,000 miles by horse, mule, camel, ox-wagon, junk, dhow, raft, and on foot – around three times the distance Marco Polo claimed to have covered. He had got as far north as the Volga and as far south as Tanzania. He had surfed the scholarly internet, meeting fellow Moroccans in China and savants from Samarkand in Granada. His itinerary was as irrational as that of a New Zealand backpacker. At one point, he left Jeddah by sea for India, only to get there via Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, the Crimea, Constantinople, the steppe, Khwarizm, Khurasan, Transoxiana and Afghanistan. Inexplicable spatial blips teleported him across hundreds of miles and then returned him, just as suddenly, to the point where he had left his original road. Along the way, he had been judge, hermit and ambassador, and had plotted a coup in the Maldives. He had earned the title Traveller of Islam, and can justly claim to be the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age.

Apart from all this, IB was a great travel writer. That irresistible urge to impart information brought on an occasional bout of the Baedekers, if not in IB himself then in his editor. But he was too ill-disciplined, too fond of digression to compile a
reiseführer
. As I read, I realized that he wrote not in guidebook monochrome, but with the colour and detail of a limner. His descriptions are like contemporary manuscript illustrations – crowded, vivid and closely observed, the salient features zoomed into the foreground. Before, I had always looked at IB’s age through the inverted telescope of history; now I was viewing with the glass the right way round. Like the temporal vertigo I had felt on discovering the link between my friend Hasan and IB’s Yemeni host, it was a dizzying experience.

For several hours a day I read on, carried along by constant changes of scene. I tried to follow IB in the atlas. He evaded me briefly on the Red Sea coast, and more frequently in Anatolia. Further east, he often had me hopelessly lost and hypothesizing wildly: were the dog-faced tribes in Burma or Borneo? did the Amazon-like queen rule in the Philippines or in Japan? My unmitigatedly grotty edition of the
Travels
, devoid of maps and footnotes, was good exercise and had me panting after the author as he disappeared ahead over one horizon after another.

But it was not just the need to know where he’d got to that kept me going. Something else had been happening: the authorial presence, at first wispy and ectoplastic, had filled out. IB was no longer a dead medieval writer. He had become thoroughly, agreeably human. Physically, he remained a blank: he tells us nothing of his appearance except that – like every adult Muslim male of the day save eunuchs and a sect of antinomian depilating Qalandars – he had a beard. But he gradually revealed other bits of himself – a soft heart, a big head, a huge libido. And there was a tender underside to the Great Traveller. He had to leave an audience with the Sultan of Delhi in the Hall of a Thousand Columns because of a boil on the backside; and after one walk, a mostly level eighteen miles, he complained: ‘My feet had become so swollen in my shoes that the blood was almost starting under the nails. For six days I was powerless to rise to my feet because of the pains that they had sustained.’ The boils and blisters are curiously modern, a well-trodden topos of current travel literature. IB displayed his artlessly. It was because of this endearing tendency to bare himself that, the more I read of him, the closer I got to know
him
and the more I came to like him. ‘
C’est quasi le même de converser avec ceux des autres siècles
’, wrote Descartes, ‘
que de voyager
.’ With IB I felt I had done both.