economies of the northern frontier and also a factor in the commission of the embassy: a fort, along the lines of Sarkel on the Don, would have provided the Muslims with a stronghold from which to resist the Khazars and control the flow of trade through the confluence of the Volga and the Kama and would have been a statement of Islamic presence in the area. Or is this speculation just the imposition on the fourth/tenth century of our own obsessions with economic viability?
For Shaban, this diplomatic adventure was a “full-fledged trade mission … a response to a combined approach by Jayhānī and the chief of the Bulghār.” Shaban thinks the Volga mission was a cooperative venture between the Samanids and Abbasids masterminded by al-Jayhānī, an assertion for which there is no shred of evidence. He reasons that the Samanids needed allies to help control the Turkic tribes north of Khwārazm.6
Togan, who discovered the Mashhad manuscript in 1923, suggested that conversion to Islam as conceived and practiced by the caliphal court in such a distant outpost of the empire would have acted as a corrective to Qarmaṭian propaganda, to Zoroastrian prophecies of the collapse of the caliphate at the hands of the Majūs (a name, in Arabic texts of the period, for fire-worshippers, i.e., both Zoroastrians and Vikings!), and to Shiʿi missionary activity, and would have countered the spread of any of these influences among the already volatile Turkic tribes.7 Togan was a Bashkir Bolshevik who had fallen out with Lenin over policies concerning Togan’s native Tataristan and was living in exile in Iran. It is hardly surprising that he read the mission in such richly ideological terms.
According to one commentator, the court must have reasoned that, by controlling how the Volga Bulghārs observed Islamic ritual, it could control their polity, a position that owes more to modern notions of political Islam than to an understanding of the fourth/tenth century.8
Do we need to be so suspicious? Of course, the religious overtones of the king’s petitions were sure to appeal to the caliph and his court. Here was a foreign ruler who had embraced Islam, requesting religious instruction, as well as the construction of a mosque and a minbar from which he could acknowledge the caliph’s suzerainty, and seeking assistance against unspecified enemies, presumably the Khazars, although the Rus’ always represented a threat. The construction of a fort on the Volga bend would have followed the precedents set by both Rørik’s hill-fort, built by the Rus’, and
Sarkel, built on the Don by the Byzantines for the Khazars.
It might be helpful to take a brief look at some disparate examples of the Christian ideology of trade, travel, warfare, and expansion. In 1433, Dom Manuel justifies the Portuguese voyages of discovery:
not only with the intention that great fame and profit might follow to these kingdomes from the riches that there are therein, which were always possessed by the Moors, but so that the faith of Our Lord should be spread through more parts, and His Name known.9
Jonathan Riley-Smith has argued that religion and self-interest were inseparable in the outlook of the early Crusaders.10 Stephen Greenblatt discusses the “formalism” of Columbus’s “linguistic acts,” and Margarita Zamora draws attention to the equal weight given spiritual and worldly (i.e., commercial) ambitions in the “Letter to the Sovereigns.”11 Christopher Hill has been the most persistent and persuasive exponent of the religiosity of the seventeenth-century Puritan worldview, in which every aspect of man’s behavior is seen through a religious prism.12 In the wake of the feting of William Dampier upon the publication of his New Voyage round the World in 1697, the Royal Society urged seamen to greater scientific precision in their journals, “to improve the stock of knowledge in the world and hence improve the condition of mankind.”13 And by improving “the condition of mankind,” we can savor the ambiguity between Enlightenment reason and the mission civilatrice that would come with conversion to Christianity.
It is muddle-headed to consider religious motives as mere justification for interference in “foreign” affairs. The caliphal court would not have known what we mean by these distinctions. Such a line of reasoning attempts to separate and differentiate between a mutually inclusive set of notions: missionary activity, conversion, trade, and expansion of the caliphate. What I am advocating is respect for the integrity of Ibn Faḍlān’s account.
YĀQŪT’S QUOTATIONS
The Arabic text of Ibn Faḍlān’s book exists in two formats: as part of a manuscript contained in the library attached to the Mausoleum of the imam ʿAlī al-Riḍā in Mashhad, Iran, discovered in 1923 by A. Zeki Validi Togan (the text translated in this book as Mission to the Volga); and as six quotations in Yāqūt’s Muʿjam al-buldān (Dictionary of Places) (also translated in this book).
Yāqūt ibn ʿAbdallāh al-Rūmī al-Ḥamawī (574-75–626/1179–1229) was a biographer and geographer renowned for his encyclopedic writings. “Al-Rūmī” (“the man from Rūm”) refers to his Byzantine descent, and “al-Ḥamawī” connects him with Ḥāmah, in Syria. In his topographical dictionary Kitab Muʿjam al-buldān, he included quotations from Ibn Faḍlān’s account, which remained the principal vestiges of the work until Togan’s discovery of the Mashhad manuscript in 1923.
The geographical dictionary of Yāqūt includes excerpts from Ibn Faḍlān’s book in six lemmata:
1. Itil: Wüstenfeld 1.112.16–113.15 = Mashhad 208a.4–208b.9 → §68 of the present translation.
2. Bāshghird: Wüstenfeld 1.468.17–469.15 = Mashhad 203a.7–203b.3 → §§37–38 of the present translation.
3. Bulghār: Wüstenfeld 1.723.6–19 = Mashhad 196b.18–197a.12; 1.723.19–724.9 = Mashhad 203b.5–204a.3; 1.724.9–725.4 = 204a.4–204b.7; 1.725.5–726.16 = 205b.1–206a.12; 1.726.16–727.1 = 206b.2–10; 1.727.2–3 = 206b.14–16; 1.727.3–10 = 206b.17–207a.5; 1.727.10–12 = 207a.9–11; 1.727.12–13 = 207a.16–17; 1.727.14–21 = 207b.4–11; → §§2–4, 39–44, 48–50, 51, 53–56, 59, 61–63 respectively of the present translation.
4. Khazar: Wüstenfeld 2.436.20–440.6 (only 2.438.11–14 matches the extant text in the Mashhad manuscript) = Mashhad 212b.15–19 = §90 of the present translation.
5. Khwārazm: Wüstenfeld 2.484.10–485.23 = Mashhad 198a.17–199a.3 = §§8–11 of the present translation.
6. Rūs: Wüstenfeld 2.834.18–840.12 = Mashhad 209b.17–212b.15 =. §§74–89 of the present translation.
Yāqūt frequently remarks that he has abbreviated Ibn Faḍlān’s account, occasionally criticizes him, and expresses disbelief in his version of events. He stresses that his quotation of Ibn Faḍlān’s passage on the Rūs is accurate and implies that it is a verbatim quotation. This raises, in my mind, the possibility that Yāqūt may not be quoting Ibn Faḍlān so accurately in the other five lemmata. And a close comparison between the passages on the Rūs in both sources reveals that, here too, Yāqūt’s quotation may not, strictly speaking, be verbatim but may have been subjected to modification, paraphrasing, and rewording. (I say “may have been” because it is likely that Yāqūt was quoting from an ancestor to the actual Mashhad manuscript.) Furthermore, in the lemma devoted to the Khazars, Yāqūt confuses quotations drawn from al-Iṣṭakhrī’s midfourth/tenth century work Kitāb al-Masālik wa-l-mamālik (The Book of Highways and Kingdoms) with the quotation he took from Ibn Faḍlān, although it is also possible that this section of the Khazars has been taken from al-Iṣtakhrī’s text and added to Ibn Faḍlān’s account by the compiler of the Mashhad manuscript.
For the sake of completeness and in order to make clear the differences between Yāqūt’s versions and the work translated as Mission
