Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah (47 page)

I wondered why IB had crossed to the steppe empire of the Golden Horde. He offered no clues. Fate had set his journey in motion, a growing love of travel had kept it moving; but what about the itinerary? From the
Travels
, one would imagine he existed in a purely accidental world: he was in Turkey, then he went to the Crimea. Reading between the lines, however, I suspect that two pieces of information were on his mind: that Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde, was a recent and keen convert to Islam; and that, his territories being vaster by far than those of all the princelings of Anatolia combined, he was rich.

I walked back to Sinop along the lower slopes of the promontory. Cows munched at the scrub between unfinished shells of buildings. As I was passing an inhabited villa, a man watering the garden invited me for coffee. Vural spoke only Turkish and German but his daughter, Hale, was a fluent English-speaker. They had never heard of the hermitage, but knew much about the other monuments of Sinop. ‘The one that’s impressed me most’, I said, ‘is Pervane’s
madrasah
. Not just the building, but the fact that it’s still in use.’

Vural caught the gist of this, and was wrinkling his nose even before Hale translated. When she did, he smiled darkly and muttered something about ‘
arabische Mikroben
’. To illustrate the point, he darted into the garage, came out with a can of flyspray and directed imaginary blasts towards the town. ‘
Paff!
…
Paff!
’

It hardly needed an explanation; but Hale said, ‘What he means is that these places are dangerous. The boys will grow up and try to spread
shari’ah
, Islamic law.’ We talked on, I the infidel defending Islamic tradition and continuity, Vural the Muslim vehemently attacking these subversive institutions, until a sudden blast of wind off the sea set the power-lines shrieking. It was cold, a first breath of
winter
, ‘when the Land of al-Rum is like glittering glass, its air like stinging hornets’. Our looking-glass debate came to an end.

I walked on briskly and stopped for an early supper at the Pasha Battery, a Crimean War fort that advertised itself as a restaurant and casino. In the empty dining-room, the waiter pressed champagne and whisky on me. I said I’d just have a beer. ‘And have one yourself,’ I offered, thinking that the place needed cheering up a bit.

He smiled. ‘I don’t drink. You see, I’m at the
İ
mam Hatip Lisesi. I’m going to be a mosque preacher,
in sha Allah
.’

I told him that a casino seemed a strange choice of workplace for a future
khatib
. I certainly couldn’t imagine the Arabian microbes at the Pervane
madrasah
or my
rafiq
Yalçın, also at Islamic high school, plying people with hard liquor. The waiter merely shrugged. Perhaps there was no choice.

At the far end of the restaurant there was a small stage with a two-manual electronic organ. Later, inspired by the beer, and since there was still no one else about, I asked the waiter if he would switch it on. ‘You play?’ he asked. I said I did.

He also turned on some coloured lights and a revolving disco globe. And there I sat, in a vaulted Ottoman arsenal, playing Bach’s D minor Toccata to a pre-recorded
boom-shagga-boom
with the volume just this side of feedback. I was getting my own back on Pub 13.

*

‘Our stay in Sinop lasted about forty days’, lB remembered, ‘while we were awaiting an occasion to travel by sea to the Crimea. We then hired a vessel belonging to the Greeks but remained eleven days more, waiting for a favourable wind.’ IB’s seven-week wait didn’t bode well. Down in the harbour there were a few smallish fishing vessels, but little activity except on the mole, where boys dangled lines into water thick with jellyfish.

I asked around for boats to Kırım, the Crimea. The only response was the tongue-click and the languid raising of eyebrows which in Turkey denotes not surprise, but negation. At length I found a small elderly man, the owner of a fishing boat, who had a little English and a lot of wombat-coloured hair poking out between his shirt buttons. ‘Russian boats go Yalta,’ he told me. ‘Cucumbers, melons, fruits. But not now. Customs problems. Pay too much Kırım. Also economy problems.’ As he spoke, the hair wriggled fascinatingly. ‘Now Sinop
local
fishing only. Often no fish. No money no honey. Try Trabzon. Try Istanbul better.’

I thanked the hirsute talking telegram, and decided to try Istanbul.

*

I began on the quay at Karaköy, in the marble halls of Turkish Maritime Lines. They ran an occasional service to Samsun, just east of Sinop, and a summer cruise to Smyrna, Alexandria, Messina and various other Mediterranean fleshpots, and looked alarmed at the mention of the Crimea.

The streets behind the quay looked more promising. All the signs were in Cyrillic characters; import-export men wearing shades and mobile phones stood in the doorways of shops that sold chandeliers and surveillance devices. A black and chrome Chevrolet Impala cruised past, aglitter with fins.

Between the quayside buildings I spotted a ship, the
Doktor Ivan Popov
, and wondered if this might be part of the ex-Soviet research fleet which, I had heard, now kept the Ukraine and points north supplied with fridge-freezers. But how to find out?

I tried an agency which offered ‘
БИ
ΛET
Ь
I something something CTAM
Б
YΛ-O
Д
ECCA’. Inside, Mr Öner could offer me tickets not only to Odessa, but also to Novorossiysk. ‘And the Crimea?’ I asked, hopefully.

‘It is not now a regular destination,’ he said. ‘Try the Chamber of Shipping.’

In which my inquiry was answered with a decisive
yok
.

I was sitting there, wondering what to do next, when an English-speaking seaman came over and struck up a conversation. I told him all about IB; he gave me a look of profound sympathy. ‘Perhaps you go to the dock and sit,’ he suggested. ‘Wait for a ship from Kırım.’ I asked how long I might have to wait. ‘Maybe one week, maybe more …’

I pictured myself camping out on the quayside among the fridge-freezers, growing seedier by the day and clutching a bit of card: YALTA (SEVASTOPOL WILL DO).

‘Your man Ibn was here very long ago,’ said the sailor. ‘Now you go to Atatürk International Airport and you fly.’

This time I had absolutely no doubt about what IB would have done.

IB sailed from Sinop across the Black Sea to the Crimea, part of the vast territories of the Tatar Golden Horde. After a visit to the ruler Özbeg Khan, whose tented capital was at the time in the northern foothills of the Caucasus, he set out for Constantinople. IB spent a month in the Byzantine capital then, probably in October 1332, turned east and headed once more for that elusive goal – India
.

The Crimea

Fourteenth-century Features

‘I was come into a new world.’

Friar William of Rubruck (13th century), on entering the land of the Golden Horde

I
T WASN’T THE
age of the Crimean Air plane that was alarming, but the colour scheme. The walls and curtains, in two shades of blue – pleasing enough, rather Oxbridge – were teamed with a fudge-coloured carpet and blood-clot seats. Several of these collapsed under my fellow passengers. They were all Turks, all male and all very excitable, and the cabin was filled with whoops and cheers.

Crimean Air, according to the boarding pass, was my reliable partner for journeys to Tashkent, Krasnodar, Minsk, Murmansk, Chelyabinsk – what a poetical boarding pass! – Novosibirsk, Windhoek …
Windhoek?
As my mind boggled at the idea of Crimeans in the Kalahari, an air hostess appeared through the cockpit door. She was wearing a retina-jangling red trouser-suit, and looked very strict. Chatter ceased, and she began reciting the safety procedure.

As she spoke my eye fell on a large heap of ropes, nets and floats beside her at the front of the cabin. There seemed to be no explanation for their presence, unless they were some sort of primitive life-saving device in case of a forced landing in the Black Sea. I shuddered, remembering a description by a contemporary of IB of the Sea of Nitush (early on in the history of Arab geography, a copyist had got the dots wrong on
Pontus, the classical name for the Black Sea – he wrote
at that moment the wind must have changed, for Nitush it remained): ‘it is a dark and frightful sea, stormy and great of wave, seething furiously, a swift wrecker of ships,
and
frequented by waterspouts.’ Even if we escaped drowning, bobbing in our net like the Jumblies in their sieve, there was another horror, perhaps worse: the notorious Pontine sea-fart, an enormous submarine stink-bomb said periodically to explode in the Black Sea’s lower depths, bubbling up and gassing anyone unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity.

IB himself had a bad experience on the Black Sea. ‘A storm blew up against us. We were in sore straits, with destruction staring us in the face. I was in the cabin, along with a man from the Maghrib named Abu Bakr, and I bade him go up on deck to observe the state of the sea. He did so and returned, saying, “I commend you to God”.’ It didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

The air hostess finished speaking and, with perfect timing, a voice from the back of the plane exclaimed the Turkish equivalent of ‘I commend you to God’. There was a ripple of laughter, followed by a nervous silence as the plane taxied. Within a few minutes, however, we were climbing over the northern mouth of the Bosphorus, out over an innocent, blue Black Sea.

My neighbour opened his briefcase, took out a publication called
Mega-Pasha
, and was soon engrossed in an illustrated feature showing odalisques in bridal veils and knickers. I opened the
Travels
.

IB survived the storm and landed at the eastern end of the Crimea. ‘This wilderness’, he wrote, describing the steppe, ‘is green and grassy, with neither tree nor hill, high or low, nor narrow pass nor firewood. What they use for burning is animal dung, and you can see even their men of rank gathering it up and putting it in the skirts of their robes.’ Mandeville also mentioned the Tatars’ manure-mania: ‘They eat Cattes, and all maner of wyld bestes, rattes & myce, and they have but lyttle wodde, and therefore they dyght theyr meate with horse dounge & other bestes dounge … and they be ryght foule folke, and of evyll lyking.’

IB’s opinion of the Tatars was higher. Although their customs were scarcely less strange to a Tangerine than to an inhabitant of Hertfordshire, they were at least ruled over by an enthusiastic convert to Islam – Özbeg, Khan of the Golden Horde and in-law to both the Mamluk Sultan and the Byzantine Emperor. The traveller was to meet him later, in the foothills of the Caucasus; for the moment his goal was Tuluktumur, Özbeg’s governor of the Crimea, who held court in its cognate capital of al-Qiram. My intention was to look for
traces
of IB’s Tatars, but I was also keen to meet their modern-day descendants: expelled from the Crimea by Stalin in 1944 for ‘collaboration’ with the Germans, 250,000 Crimean Tatars had returned home after the break-up of the Soviet Union – albeit to a frosty reception from the Russian and Ukrainian majority.

Among my other Battutian destinations was Kaffa, ‘one of the world’s celebrated ports’, renamed Feodosia when Catherine the Great took the Crimea from its last ruling khan. When IB was there, Kaffa was a trading enclave under a Genoese governor and populated by Genoese, Venetians, Florentines, Turks, Russians, Egyptians, Greeks, Circassians, Armenians, Alans and Provençals. It was his first experience of a mainly Christian town, and it was a shock. One aspect of Feodosia particularly fascinated me: it was supposedly the place from which the Black Death spread to Europe, the Levant and North Africa. Most important of all, I wanted to investigate one of IB’s strangest overnights – in a church in eastern Crimea, where he and a monk talked icons.

As I walked out of the arrivals hall at the airport of Simferopol, the present Crimean capital, all these plans began to crumble. I was ridiculously ill-prepared. All I had to guide me was a slim Russian phrasebook, the
Travels
, various jottings from Arab geographers – none later than the fourteenth century – and the name of a hotel eighty miles away in Feodosia. I asked the Turks if they knew how to get there. They were surprised. ‘Feodosia?
Keffe?
It’s not good. Come with us to Simferopol.’ They described some of the capital’s temptations, mercantile and fleshly. I was not tempted. The Turks boarded a bus and I was left alone, delighted by their use of the pre-Catherinian name but wondering if I would ever make it to Feodosia – let alone Kaffa.