The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (69 page)

The Yuan campaigns are notable for their aggressive ambition, and as is the case with naval campaigns generally, the logistical challenge of sending so many men and ships such great distances cannot fail to impress, even if the outcome fell short of the mark. These amphibious operations are not the only manifestation of the Yuan Dynasty’s exploitation of the sea, however. More notable in many respects was Qubilai Khan’s decision, in 1292, to send a Yuan princess betrothed to the Ilkhan of Persia not by land, as one would expect of heirs to the steppes at the height of the
Pax Mongolica, but by sea. Fourteen ships were required for her entourage, which included the Venetian Marco Polo, who was returning home with his father and uncle after a quarter century in China. The prosperity and security of the Monsoon Seas at the end of the thirteenth century is obvious not only from the fact that Qubilai Khan entrusted the agent of an important matrimonial alliance to a fleet of ships. Equally telling,
Marco Polo’s account of his passage home, which lasted twenty-one months, takes up about a quarter of
The Travels
. This was one of the most popular books in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and because its account of the ports of the Indian Ocean and China Seas was the most detailed guide available, it served as a vade mecum for the pioneers of Europe’s age of expansion.

Polo’s account was one of the first descriptions of Asia or the Indian Ocean to appear in any European language in the eight hundred years since
Cosmas Indicopleustes visited Sri Lanka a century before the rise of Islam, and it ignited an inextinguishable curiosity about the east. Europeans’ collective ignorance of places remote from their immediate experience—essentially anything east or south of the Black and Mediterranean Seas—was greater than that of other people with whom they shared the Eurasian landmass. Yet Polo’s curiosity was characteristic of the spirit of the age, and around this time there was an outpouring of descriptive writing about the wider world by peripatetic authors from places as far-flung as Christian Europe, Moorish Spain, Morocco, Persia, and China.

During the four centuries of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Chinese knowledge about maritime Asia grew faster than at any time before or since. There is a venerable tradition of Chinese writing about the
Nanhai, but the growth in sea trade with the south during the Song was a catalyst for the systematic acquisition and description of
geographic and economic knowledge, as exemplified in such works as
Zhao Rugua’s
Description of Barbarous Peoples
(or
Records of Foreign Nations
), written around 1225. The head of the
shibosi
at
Quanzhou, Zhao Rugua had access to earlier geographical texts and dynastic histories, but thanks to his official position in what was probably the busiest port in the world, he was uniquely situated to report on China’s imports and exports, and the places her trade originated, and he is the first Chinese author to describe various parts of Africa, Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean. Zhao’s work consists of a gazetteer of places and a glossary of goods. The latter details forty-three types of commodities, most of them raw materials, from camphor and frankincense to precious woods, spices, and animal products such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, and beeswax. The remainder are manufactured goods such as glass from India and “
several of the countries of the Dashi [Arabs],” rattan mats from the
Philippines, and both raw and finished cotton. Originally cultivated in India, by the late twelfth century cotton was grown in Hainan,
Indo-China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The gazetteer describes forty-six places with which China traded, either directly or indirectly, or otherwise known to Zhao Rugua. These range from the “Countries in the Sea” such as Japan, the Philippines, and Borneo, to the more distant countries of Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and its tributary seas from
Baghdad to the Somali coast, and a number of Mediterranean ports and regions including
Alexandria,
Sicily, and Andalusia.

Although a handful of Christian emissaries and Italian merchants traded along the
silk road across
Mongol-dominated Asia, for most European Christians traveling east posed insurmountable problems. Not the least of these were the expense and difficulty of navigating the alien religion and languages of the
Dar al-Islam,
which stretched from the shores of the Atlantic to India,
and beyond which there were Muslim communities on all the major land and sea routes to China. The most intrepid author to have taken advantage of this was the peripatetic Moroccan
Ibn Battuta, who between 1325 and 1354 traveled from
Tangier to China. Along the way he took side trips from the Red Sea to
Mombasa, toured the most important western Indian ports, and served as a
qadi
(judge) in the
Maldives, whose people had recently converted from
Buddhism to Islam. From there he continued east to China via Sri Lanka and the Strait of Malacca. In an astonishing “small world” moment, Ibn Battuta writes that his host in
Fuzhou asked him to receive a fellow merchant and

This chance meeting of compatriots from the Atlantic coast of Morocco in a port city on the Pacific coast of China nearly nine thousand sea miles away testifies to the scale and scope of the maritime networks that already bridged the seas of Africa and Eurasia centuries before the age of European expansion.

Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and other travelers and geographers were no less conscious observers and recorders of the world than al-Masudi,
Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, or Herodotus. They are well attuned to different cultures and cultural differences, but their works offer little insight into the day-to-day life of the merchant seafarers whose enterprise maintained the lines of communication strung the length of Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The closest we can come to looking into the mind and business practices of the medieval seafaring merchant in the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, is through the letters of the
Cairo Geniza.

Because Jewish tradition forbids the destruction of papers containing the name of God, hoards of documents and letters written by members of the Jewish commercial network centered on Cairo in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were secreted in the
geniza
(storeroom) of a synagogue. This correspondence occasionally alludes to storms and problems obtaining food for a passage—seafaring passengers were usually responsible for their own food, utensils, and bedding until the late nineteenth century—but little beyond that. To the extent that such letters color our fragmented picture of the world of the early medieval merchant, it is through their attention to the sorts of generic problems familiar to anyone who travels for a living today: plans fulfilled,
last-minute changes to itineraries, unexpected windfalls, and missed opportunities. Many of the letters brim with the timeless and universal concerns about the well-being of family and friends, anxiety about not receiving expected letters, and, occasionally, news of dramatic events ranging from shipwreck to piracy and war. But the authors focus primarily on business: the quantities of goods sold, at what price and to whom, and disputes arising from the complicated webs of consignment and trust upon which all merchants relied. The letters are replete with details about the conduct of trade through intermediaries and relations with foreign rulers.

The majority of these documents pertain to the commercial life of the Mediterranean, but a substantial number were written by merchants who traveled between Egypt and India. Jewish merchants had long been active on the Indian Ocean, but by the turn of the millennium the wealth of the Fatimid Caliphate was drawing trade away from the fading markets of the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, while Christian merchants were attaining an increasingly dominant position in the
trade of the Mediterranean. With this dual motivation, Muslim and Jewish merchants alike turned their attention to the wealth of the Indian Ocean. While most of the Geniza documents were written by merchants active on the Mediterranean, it is on the newly revived but otherwise poorly documented
commerce of the Arabian Sea that the Geniza letters cast the strongest light. They also show that two hundred years before Ibn Battuta, such encounters as he experienced in Fuzhou may not have been all that uncommon. The five Indian Ocean trading families most represented in the Geniza letters hailed from or were active in Morocco, Tunis, Cairo, Yemen, and the
Malabar Coast of India. The career of
Abraham ben Yiju seems not atypical. A native of
Mahdia, in
Tunisia, he built his business in Aden before sailing to India where he lived mostly in
Mangalore as a merchant and proprietor of a bronze foundry. Shortly after arriving in India, he purchased and freed an Indian slave who became his wife. His eighteen-year stay in India—during which he sojourned in a few other Malabari ports and traveled to Aden—ended in 1149, and he eventually settled in Cairo.

One of Abraham’s correspondents was
Madmun ben Hasan-Japheth, a shipowner of Persian descent whose family had lived in Aden for several generations. Like his father before him, Madmun was head of the Jewish community in Yemen, superintendent of the port of Aden, and a representative of merchants there, a position his descendants held until the 1200s. In a letter to Abraham characteristic of the Geniza correspondence, Madmun explains that he is sending a cargo of mats imported to Aden from the
Horn of Africa together with personal gifts including “
two [sets] of fine, large paper, government paper, the like of which no one has” in India, as well as sugar and raisins.
He also reports on the safe arrival of a cargo of iron and cardamom and asks Abraham to get in touch with three other merchants—two Indians and a third who could be either Jewish or Muslim. “And if they can they should dispatch a ship from Mangalore, and send in it any available
pepper, iron, cubeb, and ginger; it should set out at the beginning of the season for al-Dyyb [the Maldives] taking some coir, fine aloes wood, mango and coconuts, because all these are selling well.”
^c
Madmun provides detailed information on the prices these will fetch, and offers to invest in the enterprise: “If they are equipping a ship in Aden, and they want me to take part, I will share [in it] with them. If there were a ship sailing from Mangalore this year, I would send them gold, sugar, raisins and [other] goods.”

The Geniza records are replete with instances of commercial collaboration across religious lines, which include several references to “
partnerships according to Muslim law,” the
qirad,
or
commenda
. Interfaith borrowings were not limited to Jews and Muslims: on the Monsoon Seas religious and other institutional boundaries between people of different faiths were far more porous than in the Mediterranean world. Another example is found in the institution of the
karim
, “a convoy or group of nakhodas, or shipowners” adopted by Jewish merchants to compensate for the inadequacies of state protection against piracy in the Red Sea. One theory holds that the word comes from the Tamil
karyam,
meaning “business.” Initially, the
karim
seems to have been an informal collection of merchants, but by the 1200s it had achieved a prominence in the trade between Egypt, Aden, and India comparable to that of the Hanse in northern Europe at roughly the same time, although
karimi
merchants never exercised the same degree of political autonomy or influence.

On the Red Sea, the chief threat came from pirates who could threaten merchants and pilgrims en route to Jeddah,
Aydhab, Quseir-al Qadim, and other Egyptian ports. Rather than dedicate government resources to commerce protection across the entire sea, the Fatimids entrusted local merchants with their own security. Madmun ben Hasan-Japheth was empowered to conclude agreements with “
the lords of the seas and deserts”—in effect to pay for protection for both shipping and desert caravans—and to coordinate the activities of the
karim
. This seemingly offhand approach belied the sultan’s dual interest in the Red Sea. Revenues from the trade were vital to the state treasury, but
Egyptian rulers were additionally obliged to regulate access to the Red Sea to protect the pilgrimage sites of
Mecca and
Medina from infidels, and in this they were successful. Although enemies and rivals from around the Mediterranean posed a significant and persistent threat to Egypt, especially after the start of the
Crusades, they reached the Red Sea only once. In 1183, the rogue crusader
Reynald de Châtillon launched a fleet of ships which he assembled from parts carried overland to the
Gulf of Aqaba, perhaps inspired in this effort by the example of
Jehoshaphat recorded in the
Old Testament. Reynald captured or destroyed about twenty ships before the Fatimid squadron based at
Qulzum routed him.

The Fatimid fleet concentrated its efforts in the northern Red Sea; in the
Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea, Yemeni and other merchants were completely on their own. By the same token, they had little to fear from state-sponsored violence, although the Geniza letters do mention an attack on Aden by the emir of Kish and its defeat by ships belonging to a celebrated merchant named
Ramisht.
Aden did not begin to fulfill its potential as a port until the
Zurayid emirs of Yemen (1080–1173) took an interest and import duties quickly became an important source of their revenue. Aden’s prosperity under the Zurayids owed much to the broader changes sweeping the Arabian Sea. Trade in the Persian Gulf had begun to tail off due to Baghdad’s decline under the
Seljuqs.
Siraf and other ports were eclipsed by the emirate of Kish (in Arabic, Qais or Kays), an island in the
Strait of Hormuz.
Benjamin of Tudela reported that Kish was a magnet for merchants from India, Mesopotamia, Yemen, and Persia who came there to trade “
all sorts of silk, purple, and flax, cotton, hemp, worked wool, wheat, barley, millet, rye, and all sorts of food, and lentils of every description, and they trade with one another, whilst the men from India bring great quantities of spices thither. The islanders act as middlemen, and earn their livelihood thereby.”