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Journey Overview
The Late Medieval Eurasian and African Setting
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he journeys of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta took place at a pivotal
time in Afro-Asian history. Their travels coincide with events across
the continents during the second half of the 13th century that brought
a close to the medieval era and the dawn of the early modem period. These
sojourners did not seek to make a major impact on the societies they
encountered but became keen observers of the worlds that were changing
around them. They traveled lightly as they followed curiosity-driven
impulses and searched to see what the next horizon revealed. For the most
part they left only their footprints and took only what they needed to continue
on their way. Marco and Battuta were not the first to traverse to Europe,
Central Asia, the Far East, India, and Africa. Droves of diverse people had
passed back and forth across the mighty Eastern Hemisphere landmasses
throughout the millennia of recorded history preceding them. But the motive
of their precursors was rarely curiosity,but generally for military or economic
purposes. Of greater sigmficance is that both Marco and Battuta bequeathed
to their readers an unprecedented record of their remarkable experiences.
Many and mighty armies had broadcast a trail of countless transformations through the centuries. Dynasties, empires, and kingdoms rose and fell
in every comer of the hemisphere before Eurasia's Middle Ages, and each
fell prey to yet another powerful force. Reigning powers wrote stone, clay,
silk, or paper accounts of their mighty deeds. These records were often
destroyed by subsequentwarring waves of humankind seeking their glorious
place in history. Each wave eventually subsided to leave only shadowy
evidence of their once prominent existence yet influenced forever the lives
of the peoples across the land.
In addition to the movement of ancient armies across vast portions of
Asia, historic land and sea routes also carried traders and their wares from
East to West and North to South long before the appearance of Marco Polo
and Ibn Battuta. These routes transported hard evidence of the enormous
natural wealth available in Africa and Asia and availability of commercial
goods fashioned by the diverse cultures living across the land. But trade
carried by camel caravans and ships, like invading armies pillaging the land,
did not facilitate an exchange of cultures. Women in Venice, Italy knew
nothing about whose hands had woven the beautiful silks from Cathay they
used to create fine garments. Chinese Nestorian Christians in the Mongol
capital of Khanbalic had read of Rome and Jerusalem in tattered copies of
their holy writings, but there was no memory of anyone ever seeing these
places. Commerce and war truly had done little to acquaint East and West
with all the cultural wonders each possessed.
Eastern and Western cultures might have begun to regularly exchange
ideas long before the medieval period were it not for the rise of Islam in the
7th century, when Muslim expansion in the Middle East created a barrier
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between East Asia and Europe. Yet Muslim culture drew from both
directions and not only developed distinctive forms of art, architecture,
language, mathematics, and science but served as a living repository for the
wisdom and experience of the great civilizations of the ancient world. The
Islamic empire blended Greek and Roman discoveries with China's
flourishing arts, sciences, and statecraft. But with that efflorescence, the
military and political circumstances of the Muslim caliphates served as a
bulwark blocking effective exchange of the cultural wealth burgeoning in
the Far East, Europe, and Africa.
The Mongol Empire and Great Silk Road
The rise of the Mongol empire in the 13th century led to a bridge across
Eurasia that finally opened continental cultures to each other. Within an
astounding three decades after the establishment of a Mongol confederacy
by Genghis Khan in 1206, the empire became the largest ever in world history.
Several factors contributed to this extraordinary achievement. First, Genghis
Khan (c.1167-1227) was heir to a nomadic family tradition that had invested
his clan with the knowledge and experience in horsebreeding that led to the
acquisition of vast pastoral domains and military superiority over his tribal
neighbors. A sort of nomadic feudalism emerged on the Mongolian steppes
when he was a young man, and the power gained from these alliances
combined with his iron willpower to forge a formidable fighting force.
Mongol strength was further consolidated by the Great Khan's investure of
centralized authority in capable sons, grandsons, and favorite paladins who
marshaled vast forces in their quest for wealth and power.
The Mongol onslaught spread out in all directions because conditions
in neighboring regions were especially favorable for successful invasion.
China was divided into northern and southern kingdoms and weak from
recurrent internal conflict, while the Turkic and Muslim states of Central
Asia were divided among themselves and ignorant of any threats against
them. The Mongols possessed tactical superiority because of the speed and
mobility of their mounted armies and because of the policy of secrecy,
intelligence, and terror conducted by the khans. By 1206 the Kirghiz of
northwestern Mongolia were subdued while the Uighurs of the Altai
Mountains surrendered. In 1215Beijing was captured along with the Chinese
emperor's treasury, yet another asset that reveals the Mongol's capacity for
consolidation of power. Outstanding Chinese scholars, scientists, and
advisors were recruited to serve the new conquerors and begin a pattern
of tolerance for new ideas and recognition of cultural contributions to be
valued in the empire.
In 1218 a party of 450 merchants from Mongolia were massacred by a
Central Asian governor at Otrar on the Silk Road near present Almaty,
Kazakhstan, and the envoy dispatched by Genghis Khan to demand
retribution was executed. This event unleashed the khan's fury upon the
region and he personally led an army of some 200,000, which captured Otrar
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and Bukhara in the spring of 1220.For two more years he extended his control
across northern Afghanistan before returning eastward. Genghis Khan's
death in 1227 scarcely affected the expansion of the Mongol empire as his
conquests were divided among his four sons to establish the Mongol
"hordes," or vast Asian domains. The westernmost portion, or Golden Horde,
fell to Genghis Khan's youngest son, Batu, who led campaigns deep into
Russia in 1237. By the following spring Moscow was in Mongol hands and
in December 1238 Kiev fell. The invaders struck into Poland the following
spring and after a savage battle at Liegnitz they sliced off an ear from
enough victims to fill nine enormous bags. Following the Mongols'
overwhelming victory at Mohi, Hungary in April 1241, word of his brother
Ogodei's recent death reached Batu. He withdrew his forces to Russia while
he returned to the Mongol capital of Karakorum to participate in the
election of the new Great Khan. This fortuitous event likely spared Europe
from a Mongol invasion.
Genghis Khan's remarkable grandson, Kublai Khan (1215-1294), used
military force, intrigue, and family alliances to consolidate rule throughout
the East Asian White Horde in the 1250s. In 1260 he was elected Great Khan
of all the Mongols and used his authority to administer the empire more in
accordance with Chinese traditions. In 1264he relocated the imperial capital
from Karakorum to Khanbalik (Beijing) and in the following decade his
dynasty assumed the Chinese title "Yiian." With the surrender of Southern
China's Sung dynasty to him in 1279, Kublai Khan found the whole country
united under his rule. The Great Khan's tolerance for new ideas, respect for
other religions, and curiosity about foreign cultures gave birth to a flowering
of cultural development in this period of Asia's late medieval period.
Kublai Khan may have been the greatest of Asia's Mongol rulers, and it
was during his reign that stability was substantially restored to the ancient
Great Silk Road that stretched for thousands of miles from the Eastern
Mediterranean to China. The Great Silk Road was actually a series of three
principal branches across Western and Central Asia. These routes shifted in
importance with political changes in the region and stretched eastward from
ports on the Black Sea, Aegean Sea, and Eastern Mediterranean. The main
northern, central, and southern routes converged at Bukhara in present
Uzbekistan and lay in the shadow of the lien Shan Mountains through
Samarkand and Tashkent to the caravanasaries of Otrar near present Almaty.
What lay beyond these exotic regions along the other half of the Great Silk
Road in places like Kashgar, Xi'an, and Cathay's fabled capital of Khanbalic
remained a mystery to medieval Europeans. Yet the precious stones, brilliant
silks, shimmering taffetas, medicinal ginseng roots, and other Eastern trade
goods that accumulated in the noisy bazaars of Turkey and Persia led some
Europeans to venture beyond Central Asia. Their motivations were both
commercial and cultural and the first ones, like young Marco Polo in the
company of his father and uncle, became important envoys of continental
cultural exchange.
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Unlike those who had traveled before them, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta
made their mark in history not because they radically changed the cultures
they visited. It was precisely because their travels did not change that which
they saw and heard that those journeys served as a valuable link between
East and West. Most important to later generations, they each set down in
writing their perceptions of what their eyes and ears beheld. Their journals
introduced both the Eastern and Western hemispheres to a global structure
of cultural diversity never before conceived until their writings were widely
published. Their journals also introduced the nature of two very different
travelers to all who followed in their footsteps.
Those two medieval traveling journalists rose from very different
backgrounds. They each developed different worldviews in the context of
their individual religious, political, and cultural environments. Each saw
what passed before him from a very different perspective. As their journeys
crossed paths on the African Eurasian continents, each found himself received
differently by those whom he visited, and each subsequently intended his
journals for very different readers.
Although Marco Polo's name is widely recognized in the Western world,
and Ibn Battuta's is not, little is commonly known of either of their lives,
what kind of people they were, where they came from, or how they were
raised in the specific cultures from which they emerged. While some of those
details can be drawn from secondary resources, careful examination of their
journals do tell us in great detail about where they went and what they saw
and heard on their journeys. Topics of significance derived from their trips
emerge from such close examination, as well as do some clues indicating
the importance of linking Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta together in this Journey
of Discovery experience. These two individuals' Lifetimes converged in this
pivotal period, Battuta leaving on his pilgrimage the year after Marco Polo
died in 1324. Their lives provide a personal context and sequential picture
of both Eurasia and Africa in the second half of the 13th century.
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The Travels of Marco Polo
Marco Polo was born in Venice, Italy, but of his birth and childhood before
his departure on his extended journey he tells little, leaving historians to
glean details from genealogies, documents, and historic context. Of merchant
stock, Marco was raised from infancy by a mother left to parent him alone in
a society where merchants were somewhat suspect due to their penchant
for itineracy. His mother having died early, Marco was likely cared for during
his father's long absence by other members of the Polo merchant family. His
early life probably included little schooling, although he could read and
write and seems likely a quick student, evidenced by his ability to learn
languages rapidly and effectively, although his writings speak not so much
of formal education as connection to the common, uneducated merchant
class. He must have attended Catholic Church festivals in crowded, bustling
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Venice, probably dressed in silks and furs. Reeking of onions and garlic as
he wandered familiar streets and canals, he would have seen master mosaic
workers building cathedrals, and admired the profuse statuary gracing the
streets and squares. Wherever he walked or rowed he saw change, old being
replaced by newer luxurious buildings. He was exposed to manners and
morals anything but strict in a European seaport, and crime was rife.
He also saw boats. He saw Venetian boats sail away to every European
sea and river. He heard sailors' tales of war, piracy, and shipwreck. His life
changed dramatically with the return of Nicolo and Maffeo, his father and
uncle. He heard from their lips tales of the lands they had traveled, the
commodities and currencies they had traded, about how other people lived.
In 1271 he set off with his father and uncle on a journey too incredible for
him to possibly imagine at the start.
Leaving the skyline of Venice behind, the Polos sailed east on the
Mediterranean, toward Syria, docking at Acre, then sailing south to Joppa
from where they journeyed overland to Jerusalem. Back by sea to Acre they
collected documents to envoy back to the khanregarding the uncertain status
of the Popedom, then set forth once again heading for China. Their trip was
delayed by a rebellion in Laias where they had word from the newly elected
Pope Gregory, who summoned them back to Acre. Gregory did not have the
Christian scholars Kublai Khan requested, save two friars who faced east
with the Polos on a mission blessed by the Pope only to defect at the first
sign of trouble. Undaunted, the Polos forged ahead. While Marco was not
clear on the exact route they traversed from Venice to Beijing, he tells of
desert crossings, difficult mountain passes, and a wavering line following
the Greek wind and the Polestar, that is northeast.
His text leads fellow travelers through Little Armenia, Anatolia, and
Great Armenia, then along the banks of the Tigris River to Mosul, perhaps
to Baghdad, then surely to Tabriz, a large trade center where they bought
and sold goods. They then changed direction, heading south to Kerman,
then to Hormuz on the Persian Gulf from where they planned to set sail for
China. Concluding available ships were unsafe, due to their being held
together with coconut husk twine, the caravan turned back northeastward toward the Pamir Highlands. It was on that route that Marco heard of
the Old Man of the Mountains and his Assassins as their caravan alternately
passed through parched deserts and fertile lands. They trekked through
Afghanistan, finally arriving in Badaskshan, the home of balas rubies, in
Central Asia. Traveling on to Kashrnir, they finally reached the summit of
the Pamirs.
Pushing on through Sinkiang, they visited Kashgar, then Khotan where
jade and emeralds fed the Chinese market. Wild desert expanses stretched
out ahead of them as they neared the Gobi where Marco first encountered
Chinese manners and customs. Moving on, they approached regions where
the inhabitants were pure Chinese, and the legendary domains of Prestor
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John. Nearing the end of their more than three year journey, they found
royal entertainments and generous supplies awaiting them as their travelweary caravan neared Shangtu, the summer capital of the Mongol empire.
Marco traveled far and wide in China for more than two decades before
the Polos headed home by sea, but not in twine bound boats. They sailed in
Chinese ships built with sixty cabins, watertight cargo compartments, and
manned by 200 to 300 sailors. Sailing south from China, the ships stopped in
Java, Sumatra, and Ceylon and proceeded to India. All the while Marco
documented the exotic trade products readily available, a reality duly noted
by Christopher Columbus a century later. Madagascar and Zanzibar
appeared on Marco's itinerary, then Abyssinia, Aden on the Arabian
Peninsula, and a final stop in Hormuz. From there the Polos traveled across
land to the Mediterranean Sea, then sailed home to Venice.
Even though he was the first to cross the entire continent and name the
countries and provinces he visited in order, Marco had little influence on either
the medieval European physical or cultural geographical view of the world,
yet his travels had a profound influence on him. Traveling about the Far East
as an envoy for Kublai Khan, he was seen as an arm of the Mongol conquerors,
yet he saw things as a Westerner abroad in the midst of strange and unstudied
cultures and lands. What he saw, and later dictated, while traveling to China
and back included not just a list of countries, but the deserts of Persia, and the
precious stones of Cathay, Siberia and the polar bears of the Arctic, the heat
and myths of India, the khan's court, Mongol hordes, birds, exotic animals,
temples, local customs, and lively historic and allegorical legends. He found
in China a circumstance of polish, courtesy, and respectful familiarity
distinguishing Chinese social intercourse, which colored all his accounts.
Architecture caught his attention more than any other artistic expression,
literature emerging only as dictated by history. Marco Polo spoke of natural
science, liberal arts, physics, and astronomy only in the context of the lives
he passed by. His interests were clearly directed to popular tradition more
than the elevated literati experience. Layered in were anecdotes catching a
distant echo of real events. He wrote history like a journalist, responding to
topics and events of the day, presenting his perspective on what he heard
and saw. His themes were of a serious sort and in a real sense he outlined
human geography, rather than precise topography leaving little said about
spiritual life. His journals only provided a rich descriptivepanorama of sights
and sounds.
A sparse picture of the character of Marco Polo emerged from his
writings, in which he spoke minimally of himself. He appears frank,brave,
tactful, loyal and enthusiastic, anxious to participate in the current life as he
found it. Untouched by the oddities of situations he beheld, he judged not,
using speech concerned with the business of life without excessive vision,
passion, or imagination.Marco Polo spent some time in prison after his retum
to Italy, where he dictated his travel journal, then led a quiet life until, having
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never convinced his contemporaries that his tales of adventure were true,
he died the year before Ibn Battuta left Morocco on his dramatic personal
adventure. Ibn Battuta too traveled and wrote, but his life story was colored
quite differently than was Marco Polo's.
The Rihla of IbnBattuta
Born into a family of Muslim legal scholars in 1304, Abu Abdallah
Muhammad Ibn Abdallah Ibn Battuta, known as Ibn Battuta, grew up in
Tangier, Morocco on the southwestern end of the Strait of Gibraltar, where
Africa and Europe converge. Like Marco, Battuta lived where ships passed
by in a city of international character. Merchants, warriors, craftsmen, and
scholarsmilled about before his eyes. Young Battuta seemed not so interested
in the bustle of the city, but submerged himself in Koranic studies demanded
by the sophisticated urban society into which he was born.
That society had risen in response to the movement south from Spain of
Islamic nobility under pressure of the reconquista, resulting in a hazardous
state of internal affairs in Morocco. Battuta, after his thirty years of travel,
chose to speak little of the turmoil around his young life, only that he was
descended from Berbers, and that his family pursued careers as legal scholars
or judges and were well schooled in Islamic law.
While there was no college in Tangier as Battuta grew up, he attended a
local mosque to memorize the Koran by the age of twelve, then pursued
advanced studies in religious sciences, as was the norm. He was taught to
transmit truth, moral values, and social law to coming generations, as well
as to acquire the manners of a gentleman. He specialized in the law, with no
distinction in Islam between canon and secular legal systems. His judicial
training, therefore, was entirely integrated with the rest of his education.
Battuta also was introduced to Sufis, the mystical dimension of Islam,
growing up in a social climate rich in mystical beliefs woven into formal
education. His life connected him not with the merchants or men of
commerce, but with the scholarly class of the Islamic world, men of letters
who routinely traveled abroad in the Muslim world, seeking disciples and a
place to teach in the cultural centers, notably Cairo and Damascus. It was to
that traveling circuit, very different than that of the Silk Road trade route,
that Ibn Battuta was drawn as he set off on his first pilgrimage to Mecca.
Ibn Battuta, unlike Marco who sailed with a contingent of merchants,
set out alone from Tangier to join the main caravan road from Fez across the
high West Africa interior plains to Tlemcum, then headed northward to the
ports of Oran and Honein on the Mediterranean coast. On the way he caught
up with two learned envoys with whom he traveled until they took ill. He
then pressed on to Algiers with a party of merchants, then again headed
east through the Eastern Maghrib clear through to Constantine. Tunis, the
next major city, saw him arrive sick with a fever and stay there for two
months, joining the erudite elite who set the mood for his later exemplified
taste, piety, and restraint.
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In the late winter of 1326 he arrived in Alexandria and took time before
the next pilgrimage season to widely explore the Nile Valley region, after
which he proceeded to Damascus where a great concentration of eminent
jurists and theologians gathered. He and several thousand other pilgrims
then prepared to join the hajj caravan to Medina, a forty-five to fifty day
caravan trip across Arabia. He then made his first pilgrimage to Mecca, which
inspired him to then go on to tour Persia and Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula.
He returned to the Nile Valley, headed northeast to Anatolia and the Black
Sea area, crossed the steppe, and proceeded to India, Malabar, and the
Maldives. His remarkable travels extended as far as China, from where he
returned to East Africa in 1349, just as the Black Plague began sweeping
across his home continent.
His journey wove its way through a totally different religious and
political context than did Marco Polo's. Marco traveled in lands where people
cared little to know about Europe, lands where he was an oddity permitted
only because of the khan's favor. Battuta, a Muslim, traveled almost entirely
within the abode of his own culture, among like minds who held the Sacred
Law of Islam as the foundation of their social order. Battuta saw his own
beliefs and values lived out over the vast landscape of Africa and Eurasia in
a wide variety of geographic and political contexts. He encountered Muslim
hospitality, security, and friendship almost without fail and was received
cordially wherever he went.
Battuta, unlike Marco Polo, continued to travel after having returned
home. He toured Mali in the West African interior and also sailed the west
Mediterranean Sea. He then dictated his notes from his thirty years of travel,
intending his story to be of interest to like- minded Muslims, but his book
was to remain little read during his life, which ended in 1368, and hidden
from Western eyes for nearly 300 years. His book was the longest, most
complex book of travel to emerge from medieval times. He wrote of
personalities, places, governments, customs, and curiosities of his time,
writing that eventually became a major historical resource.
Ibn Battuta traveled simultaneously as a Muslim pilgrim, a scholar of
jurisprudence, a member of a worldly literati elite, and an adventurer. It
was that elite, spiritual perception through which he examined medieval
political, cultural, and geographic aspects, offering in his rihla details on
almost every conceivableaspect of human life, frequently giving his opinion,
usually in a personable, engaging manner. When he dictated his account of
the cities he visited, his focus turned to rulers, distinguished men of learning,
and pious saints who were entertainment to his mind. He also wrote of
cuisine, botany, social practice, dynastic history, and the price of chickens,
employing descriptive observationsas well as rhetoric and verse to chronicle
his experiences.
Remaining at the heart of his book of travel is an autobiographicalthread
revealing his character through human response to events, annoyances,
animosities, and personal intrigues. He emerges gregarious, high-spirited,
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sometimes impetuous, pious, and lettered. lbn Battuta directed his writings
to medieval men of learning whose interests were neither political nor
economic, but cultural. He fortuitously touched down in cosmopolitan
kingdoms as they thrived across the hemisphere and so opened a window
into the medieval era of Afro-Eurasia at a pivotal time.
Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta traveled the same sprawling landmass yet
saw many of the same cultures from widely diverse perspectives. They also
employed very different writing plans. Polo spoke little of himself but offered
a treatise of empirical geography. Battuta became a geographer in spite of
himself and spoke of his competence as a man thriving in the Islamic world.
Together they gave the common world an uncommon look at the exciting
arena of medieval Afro-Eurasia in their journals of discovery.
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