Mission to the Volga. Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

      FOREWORD

      TIM SEVERIN

      I was still a university student the only time I rode with a camel caravan. A gang of Baluch tribesmen were smuggling contraband to Hormuz on the shores of the Persian Gulf and had chosen to take an obscure track through highland wilderness to avoid police checkpoints. Marco Polo was likely to have used the same trail on his way to Cathay—I was trying to retrace his path using his description of the terrain—and the caravan was very small, some twenty beasts. The Baluch walked, leading the animals, but I had a broken foot so was permitted to perch up on an extremely uncomfortable saddle. I travelled with them for only a few days, but the memory of the discomfort is enough for me to appreciate what Ibn Faḍlān must have endured as he accompanied the mission to the Volga. Also I shared his sense of unease about the rapacity of his companions of the road.

      In his tale, Ibn Faḍlān comes across as someone trying to make the best of a disagreeable but unavoidable situation. You sense his alarm when the citizens of al-Jurjāniyyah, the last city in Khwārazm before he enters the realm of the semi-nomadic Turks, warn him that extreme cold will make the next stage of his journey thoroughly unpleasant. They predict that he will perish unless he is warmly dressed, and one suspects they succeeded in persuading him to purchase the necessary extra garments from them.

      While Ibn Faḍlān and his companions wait in al-Jurjāniyyah for the weather to improve, the mission purchases “Turkish” camels. Were these animals locally bred and owned and therefore better able to cope with the harsh conditions that lay ahead? Or are we to infer that his idea of a “Turkish” camel is a two-humped Bactrian in contrast to the one-humped dromedary? Having arrived from Baghdad, Ibn Faḍlān would have been familiar with dromedaries, and they would have been better suited for the earlier stages of his journey as when skirting around the Dasht-e-Kavir. Beyond al-Jurjāniyyah, the Bactrians were certainly to be preferred.

      What is clear is that al-Jurjāniyyah had a large livestock market to supply the needs of travellers. Our traveller mentions later that his caravan numbered three thousand mounts, though this included horses. Of this multitude, by no means all would have been pack animals carrying trade goods. Some camels, like Ibn Faḍlān’s own mount, were for riding, and many would have been needed to carry the essential marching supplies. The camelmen were professionals: they knew from experience that the caravan would have to be self-sufficient on its journey, and for how long. So they packed sufficient bread, millet and cured meat to last three months. All this food would have to be loaded, together with tents, cooking gear, spare harnesses, fodder, and—significantly—equipment for crossing rivers. Here again one senses Ibn Faḍlān’s puzzlement, then increasing concern, as he watches the camelmen spread camel hides flat on the ground, place the wooden frames of the camel saddles on top, then stretch the skins up and around the saddle frames. They are assembling and testing the rudimentary coracles that they will deploy when the caravan reaches the banks of the great rivers. The animals will be swum across, with much shouting and cajoling. Meanwhile small groups of travellers must balance in these makeshift vessels and paddle themselves and their goods to the far bank. Unsurprisingly, these make-do watercrafts prove to be none too stable and at least one capsizes during a river crossing, and the passengers drown.

      So Ibn Faḍlān sets out from al-Jurjāniyyah under no illusions about whether that the road ahead is gruelling. It has neither bridges, fords, nor ferries and certainly no caravanserais to offer food and shelter. His worst fears are quickly realized. Two days out from al-Jurjāniyyah he finds himself perched on the back of a camel plodding through knee-deep snow. He is swaddled in so many layers of clothes that he can scarcely move, yet he is chilled to the bone. He feels he is ready to die. Plaintively he complains in one of his well-turned phrases, “It made the cold of Khwārazm seem like summer time.”

      Did Ibn Faḍlān take and keep notes as the caravan moved across the countryside at a modest average of ten miles per day? It is unlikely. Writing while on camel back is nigh-on impossible, and he would have been too wet, cold and woebegone at each campsite to do so. Also, there was little about the countryside that would have caught his eye. The terrain he crossed was largely featureless, flat and desolate, covered in snow at the outset, and scrubby grassland after the snowmelt. It remains as much a blank in his narrative as in the report written by the Franciscan friar Giovanni da Pian del Carpini who also rode to the Volga three centuries later as a papal legate to the Mongols.

      We get to know more about Ibn Faḍlān when he encounters the semi-nomadic Turkish tribes. He is manifestly not a country man. He concludes that the sheep of the Turks were fat in the winter because they ate snow, only to lose condition in summer because they ate grass. Apparently he was unaware that in spring the flocks were shorn of their wool and so looked thinner. Coming from

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