Detail from Piri Reis’s 16th-century map of Damietta
Following our 11th-century traveller from Jerusalem to Fatimid Egypt in the time of al-Mustansir.
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Sources:
Fulton, Michael S. Contest for Egypt: The Collapse of the Fatimid Caliphate, the Ebb of Crusader Influence, and the Rise of Saladin. Brill, 2022.
Gascoigne, Alison L. "The Water Supply of Tinnis: Public Amenities and Private Investments," Cities in the Pre-Modern Islamic World The Urban Impact of Religion, State and Society. Edited by Bennison, Amira K and Gascoigne, Alison L. Routledge, 2009.
Hunsberger, Alice C. Nasir Khusraw, the Ruby of Badakhshan: A Portrait of the Persian Poet, Traveller and Philosopher. Bloomsbury Academic, 2002.
Khusraw, Nasir. Nāṣer-e Khosraw's Book of Travels, translated by Wheeler McIntosh Thackston. Bibliotheca Persica, 1986.
Thomson, Kirsten. Politics And Power in Late Fāṭimid Egypt: The Reign of Caliph al-Mustanṣir. Bloomsbury Academic, 2016.
Script:
It has been a little while now since we last spent time with Nasir and since my last appearance here on the main podcast feed, what with the festive season coming along and then the distinctly un-festive period that immediately followed it up, with a certain amount of chaos on the personal front. With that in mind, with it having been really a pretty solid little while here between episode one and now two, I think that maybe we should get ourselves caught up before we press on with the story, so let’s have a quick recap.
Nasir Khusraw was philosopher and theologian, a poet and mathematician, a traveller, of course, and our guide and protagonist. He was born in present-day Turkmenistan right around the time that the Ghaznavid dynasty was giving way to the Seljuks, was born, in other words, in the year 1004, and he had been getting along quite comfortably in life until he experienced a kind of awakening, or so the origin story went. Nasir had been doing just fine as part of the administrative class. “A clerk by profession,” in his own words, “and one of those in charge of the sultan’s revenue service,” he had “enjoyed a life of travel, study, poetry, wine, women, and friends” until his 42nd year, when he had been visited in a dream.
He was in a period of heavy wine drinking in what we’d now call northern Afghanistan when he experienced the vision that would inspire his search for wisdom, a journey of the mind and, over quite substantial distances, the body. He had embarked on the journeys that he would describe in The Book of Travels, an account that we began with our last episode, following him west toward Turkey and then south to pause in the city of Jerusalem. That, roughly speaking, is the story so far, and that is where we will set out from today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that covers the stories of those who journeyed in that world, the envoys, friars, conquerors, merchants, and more. And it is a podcast that is supported by a Patreon at patreon.com/humancircus, where, for as little as a dollar a month or as much as makes sense for you, you can enjoy listening that is ad-free and a day early and that comes with some extra listening too. This last month for example, I was quiet on the main podcast feed as I struggled to get up and running on the new year, but over on the Patreon had two bonus mini-episodes, one on the Elizabethan New Year’s gift rolls—featuring the “Sergeant of the Pastry” and other intriguing characters—and one on the sky ships of 8th-century Ireland and also, somewhat unexpectedly, 19th-century Texas. Thank you, everyone who already supports the Patreon or has in the past.
That said, let’s get back to the story, to the story of Nasir Khusraw as he makes ready for travel to Mecca and then on to Cairo, though today we will only be visiting one of those places ourselves.
Nasir takes a moment to tell us of the Shrine of Abraham, the Tomb of the Patriarchs at Hebron, of the unequalled and handsome prayer carpet from Egypt that he saw there, of the many lamps hung from the ceiling, and of the cells where guests might stay. Barley and olives were grown there, and visitors, up to 500 of them per day, received a ration of raisins, a loaf of bread, and a bowl of lentils cooked with olive oil. I always enjoy these little notes on food.
Nasir tells us that, and then, in May of 1047, he and his companions leave for Mecca. They depart in a larger group of travellers accompanied by a guide, a, quote, “strong, pleasant-featured man who went on foot and was called Abu Bakr Hamadani.” There is mention of various places where they stop for water on the way. There is mention of the fact that no caravans came to Mecca that year and that foodstuffs were very limited. The travellers visit the Druggists’ Lane near Prophet’s Gate, and though there is threat of marauders, they go to Mount Arafat, where Muhammad had given his final, or farewell, sermon. As for Mecca, there is not actually mention of much, for Nasir writes that he will tell us more when he comes to write of his last pilgrimage there. So it is back to Jerusalem he goes at this point, but not to stay. He has plans to travel to Egypt next, with intentions of reaching there by ship, but the winds do not allow that last part.
He made his way down the coast a little and reached Ashkelon. There was an old arch there, all “of stone and so huge that it would have cost a great deal to pull it down,” which is an interesting way to put such things. How much would your accomplishments cost to pull down, or mine? I certainly know the answer to that second part.
He had made his way down to Egypt and to what would become Port Said, a place that Rudyard Kipling would one day list, alongside London, as one of two in the world where “If you truly wish[ed] to find someone you have known and who travels,” you had only to sit and wait, but that was not for a while yet. The area still had some eight centuries or so to wait, when Nasir visited, for the construction of the Suez Canal through which much of Kipling’s world would pass. Our traveller took a boat and instead turned to Tinnis, a thriving centre of textiles production then, but not for all that much longer. Certainly fewer than eight centuries.
Nasir reported it to be a pleasant island city, far enough from the shore that you couldn’t see the mainland from its rooftops. He remarked on its good bazaars and its mosques, on what he estimated as its 10,000 shops and 100 pharmacies, and on the intense heat that drove the summer market sales of kashkab, a very pleasant sounding fermented barley drink containing citron, pepper, and herbs, and something that you’ll come across in stories on the history of lemonade. He also wrote about the local production of textiles and this does indeed seem to have been the key to the place’s tenuous grip on flourishing success.
Nasir highlighted the linen, saying that the many-coloured fabric of Tinnis was equalled only by the white linen of nearby Damietta. He wrote that he had heard of a turban woven there for the sultan of Egypt that had cost 500 gold dinars and how he had later seen it himself and been told it was actually worth 4,000. He wrote that he had heard that the Byzantine emperor had once offered a full 100 cities of his own realm in exchange for Tinnis, all for access to that magnificent linen and the iridescent cloth that they produced there. It was a bit of an unlikely anecdote but one which nicely underlined the quality and renown of the product, along with its centrality to the place’s story.
This was somewhere that would need something like that in order to stand out and succeed. Its location has been described, by Alison Gascoigne, as an inconvenient one, enough so for her to write that, quote, “It is difficult to understand why a large and wealthy industrial settlement like Tinnis should have grown up [there].”
John Cassian, theologian and monk, had visited in the 4th century and attributed its situation to an earthquake-caused flood which had, as Gascoigne puts it, “transformed a formerly rich agricultural hinterland into salt marshes,” and if that indeed was true, then the change in circumstances was extreme, from productive farming land to an island surrounded by the brackish Lake Manzala and prone to all the complications that this posed in obtaining enough fresh water for drinking, ablutions, and other applications. Complications which were certainly present when Nasir visited, whether or not the multiple reports of a long-ago transformational flood were actually accurate.
By Nasir’s reckoning, there were some 50,000 living people there, and that was a reckoning shared by a contemporary, a government official who based his estimate on the bread rations and figured one fifth of those 50,000 to be weavers. It was a lot of people on a relatively small area of land, adding up to the kind of population density that was comparable to places like Mumbai, Dhaka, and Hong Kong, higher even than those places. Lower, Gascoigne noted at the time of her writing, than Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip, since devastated by Israeli forces.
Though exact numbers are always a little difficult to be sure of, there were clearly a great many people all depending on water to be brought to them, and not the salty waters of that lake. It had to come by rain and by boat, and though those sources seem like they could only ever be supplementary, given the location’s lack of rainfall, they had been the only ones prior to the cisterns’ construction in the 9th century. For the most part, it had, like so much of Egyptian life then, to come by the Nile.
Each year when the river flooded, assuming that all was well and it did so, it inundated the lake with enough fresh water for it to become drinkable, and each year, for about two months according to one source, channels would be opened, allowing Tinnis’s cisterns to be filled against the remainder of the year. I’m sure there were some stressful periods to say the least, ones when, as we saw with ʿAbd al-Laṭīf al-Baghdādī in the very early 1200s, the Nile simply did not rise as much as needed, and Tinnis was vulnerable in other ways also.
It was really out there on its own, available to potential assault by a seagoing army, by crusaders for example. It would be plundered twice in the 1150s by vessels from Sicily and then in the late ‘60s by ships sent by Amalric of Jerusalem. It was sacked repeatedly in the latter half of that century, and while Salah ad-Din would look to strengthen its fortifications when he came along, he would also evacuate its civilian population to the more defensible Damietta in the early 1190s. The fortifications which were still held would last only another 30 years before Egyptian authorities would destroy them, completing the withdrawal from Tinnis.
As for our traveller, he would make his own withdrawal, though in his case not pausing to destroy any defences along the way. He and his companions would leave Tinnis and make their way up one of the many branches of the Nile, the river that flowed into the Mediterranean from out of the mountainous regions to the south of Egypt. We know that it flowed from its two tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, the two coming respectively from the Ethiopian Lake Tana and from Lake Victoria, at the border between Kenya and Tanzania. We know, but Nasir did not, and nor did anyone around him.
“They say that no one has been able to ascertain the source of the Nile,” he wrote, “and I heard that the sultan of Egypt sent some people who went along the Nile banks for a year investigating but were unable to discover the source. It is said, however, that it comes from a mountain in the south called Jabal al-Qamar[, or the Mountain of the Moon].”
By those many branches and the multitude of canals, their waterwheels to Nasir beyond counting, the Nile’s water spilled across the countryside, and the towns and villages sat on the high places above it, protected from the flooding that they depended upon, that they celebrated when it came, and that they anticipated and carefully measured. In Cairo, Nasir wrote that someone was employed to observe the measuring devices—we talked a little of those, I think, in that al-Baghdādi series—and when that someone saw the levels begin to rise, then criers would regularly be sent throughout the city with tidings of how many fingers of progress had been seen until the water had reached the expected 18 cubits. Any less than that meant hardship, and there would be vows made, alms distributed, and sorrows expressed. Out in the countryside, the people made preparations for the four months their land should be underwater, baking and drying enough bread to help see them through.
In early August of 1047, Nasir and his companions were in Fatimid Cairo, and having spoken a little of the lands and waters to the south, he situated the city for his readers. North of it was Alexandria, where the great mirror in the lighthouse was said to been capable of burning ships offshore, and beyond that was the sea, the Mediterranean that would take you to Sicily with its fine linens, west to Andalusia with its people that had white skin, red hair, and eyes like those the Slavs, or north to Byzantium, where many went raiding. Nasir was told that one branch of this sea led to “the Darkness,” where the sun never reached. To the east, was the Red Sea, where caravans went from Egypt. It could take you on to the Arabian Peninsula and still further east, he wrote, to “eventually wind up in India and China,” or south to Zanzibar and Ethiopia.
As for Cairo itself, Nasir estimates that there were, quote:
“...no less than twenty thousand shops in Cairo, all of which belong to the sultan. Many shops are rented for as much as ten dinars a month, and none for less than two. There is no end of caravanserais, bathhouses and other public buildings—all property of the sultan, for no one owns any property except houses and what he himself builds. I heard that in Cairo and Old Cairo,” he continued, “there are eight thousand buildings belonging to the sultan that are leased out, with the rent collected monthly. These are leased and rented to people on tenancy-at-will, and no sort of coercion is employed.”
Clearly, Nasir anticipated that his readers might expect a little coercion where the rental market was concerned, but it’s also one of those passages that brings the past, in this case a full millennium ago, jarringly close to the present, with talk of renting space for your shop or home and the monthly financial rhythm of it all. A four-story building rented for 15 dinars a month while Nasir was there, or at least three of its stories did. The tenant wanted to add the fourth for another five dinars, but the owner refused, saying that he might want to go there himself on occasion. In the year that Nasir was there, he wrote that the man did not go twice.
From outside the city, the sultan’s palace complex was “like a mountain because of all the different buildings and the great height,” not the first time Nasir had compared human construction to a mountain, and not the last. From inside the city, you couldn’t see the palace complex at all, for its walls were too large. Its thousand watchmen, half of them mounted, would sound the evening prayer on trumpet and drum before patrolling until dawn.
We will get into that mountainous city and the other r things Nasir saw there, the ones he cared about enough to set down in writing, but first, we’ll take a quick break.
…
In writing of Cairo, Nasir noted that the wells of the area were sweeter to drink from the closer they were to the Nile, more brackish the further away they got. He noted, as he had in Syria, the surviving remnants of a since forgotten past: four large stones, like minarets, with water trickling from the top of each but “no one knew what [they] used to be.” He wrote that the city was said to have 50,000 camels, counting only those that were used by water carriers, and that there were besides those carriers the ones who instead bore water on their backs, taking brass cups and jugs into the narrower lanes where camels could not enter, making them very narrow lanes indeed.
Nasir wrote about the city’s gardens and orchards, irrigated by well and waterwheel, the “trees planted and pleasure parks built even on the roof[tops],” which was actually less impressive to him than the way you could buy any kind of tree in any season. There were people who sold them in tubs and could bring the tub-bound tree to the customer before sinking thd tree in the ground, smashing the tub open, and carrying off the fragments. “I have never seen or heard of such a thing anywhere else in the world,” he enthused, “and it is truly clever!” He wrote about the houses “so magnificent and fine that you would think they were made of jewels, not of plaster, tile, and stone!” Those houses were free-standing, so that if one needed to they could simply open up a wall and add on to what they had without damaging their neighbour’s home.
As to those buildings of Old Cairo, Nasir would once again make the comparison of a mountain, and in viewing clusters of 7 to 14 stories high, one can see why. From a “reliable source,” he heard of one seven-story building where a man kept a garden and raised a calf on the roof, using what must have been a very substantial ox-turned wheel to water oranges, bananas, “other fruit-bearing trees, flowers, and herbs.” Nasir described bazaars in the old city where lamps must always be lit because the light of the sun never reached their covered lanes, and ones where every sort of rare good from around the world could be had.
“I saw tortoise-shell implements such as small boxes, combs, knife handles, and so on,” he wrote. “I also saw extremely fine crystal, which the master craftsmen etch most beautifully. [This crystal] had been imported from the Maghreb, although they say that near the Red Sea, crystal even finer and more translucent than the Maghrebi variety had been found. I saw elephant tusks from Zanzibar… There was a type of skin from Abyssinia that resembled leopard, from which they make sandals. Also from Abyssinia was a domesticated bird, large with white spots and a crown like a peacock’s.”
On one day in the markets, he reported seeing “red roses, lilies, narcissi, oranges, citrons, apples, jasmine, basil, quince, pomegranates, pears, melons, bananas, olives, myrobalan, [a fruit that I was unfamiliar with, along with] fresh dates, grapes, sugarcane, eggplants, squash, turnips, radishes, cabbage, fresh beans, cucumbers, green onions, fresh garlic, carrots, and beets,” and for context, he treated this as a fairly remarkable claim to make, given that some of these might be expected to grow only in a different seasons. “I myself have no ulterior motive in reporting all this,” he said.
You could have olive oil cheaply enough in those markets, but sesame less so, and the pistachio cost more than the almond. You could visit the caravanserai where only flax was sold, with tailors working on the lower floor and specialists in clothing repair above them. Whatever you purchased, you didn’t need to bring your own bag, for “The grocers, druggists, and peddlers furnish[ed] sacks for everything they [sold],” and by Nasir’s account, you didn’t need to worry about being cheated either. Any merchant caught cheating a customer was paraded through the city on a camel, bell ringing out in their hand as they proclaimed their guilt for all to hear. The year that Nasir arrived, the bazaars, along with the rest of the city, was, quote, “so arrayed that, were they to be described, some would not believe that drapers’ and money changers' shops could be so decorated with gold, jewels, coins, goldspun cloth, and embroidery that there was no room to sit down!”
There were other festivities too, and Nasir, our reporter on the ground, was there to cover them for us.
First of all, that meant something to do with water, of course. It meant the day when the canal was opened. It was what happened when the Nile had reached its desired level and all the channels and canals would be opened, but only after this one which ran through Cairo old and new and was attended by the sultan himself, along with his court, the many battalions of soldiers from here and there, and the people of the city who all come out to witness a day of spectacle and sporting events.
On the day of the opening, a great many horses, camels, and soldiers were paraded along first, and then the sultan, a, quote, “a well-built, clean-shaven youth with cropped hair, a descendant of Husayn son of Ali … mounted on a camel with plain saddle and bridle with no gold or silver and wear[ing] a white shirt … with a wide [sash].” On his head he wore a turban, and in his hand he carried a costly whip. Ahead of him went 300 Daylamites, fighters from northern Iran, with spears and arrows. Beside him rode a single parasol bearer, the parasol itself richly ornamented with jewels and pearls, and further out on left and right went those burning aloe and ambergris. All prostrated themselves and prayed as he passed.
Once he reached the head of the canal, he was handed a spear which he hurled through the air at the canal’s dam. Workers would leap forward to tear away with tools at the spot where the spear had struck. Once they’d cleared the way, water would burst through to be followed by the first ship, filled, Nasir said, with deaf mutes who, quote, “they must consider auspicious.”
The other festive affair that Nasir would cover there was one of the sultan’s biannual banquets, a great gathering of the elites in his presence and the commoners in their own company, in the city’s “other halls and places.” Nasir, speaking with a clerk of the palace who he’d befriended, made sure that he was going to be in that first category. He told the clerk that he had witnessed the courts of other great sultans, of Mahmud of the Ghaznavid Empire for example, and now he wished to see how this one compared. The clerk passed this along to the palace chamberlain, and Nasir had his invitation.
He described or rather did not describe the, quote, “constructions, galleries, and porticos that would take too long to describe adequately,” and the twelve square structures housing the banquet that were “each more dazzling than the last.” More substantially, he talked of one of those structures with a dais occupying all of one side, and the other three “all of gold, with hunting and sporting scenes depicted thereon and also an inscription in marvelous calligraphy.” There were magnificent carpets and pillows of Byzantine brocade, “indescribable latticework” of gold, and silver steps leading down to that dias, as to which he wrote that, quote, “if this book were nothing from beginning to end but a description of it, words would still not suffice.” And then there was the sugar, the incredibly vast quantities of it worked into all sorts of designs, including an orange tree on the banquet table. The sugars and other foodstuffs were brought by underground passageways from the kitchen where 14 camel-loads of ice were used every day in the production of sherbet, a real display of wealth and capability.
As is sometimes the case in these things, the details our guide chooses to include are not always the ones that we might have selected. What, besides sugar sculptures, was trotted out through the tunnels from that sherbet-producing kitchen? What did they actually eat at the feast, and what did they do? There is talk of emirs and others receiving payments due to them there, and of the people of the city being able to make requests, but what else? What of the entertainments or maybe just a little palace gossip. As to these, Nasir was silent, and he was equally so on the question of how this sultan’s splendor compared with that of the Ghaznavid one, the ostensible reason for his attendance. But as we will see, he was far from silent on how he felt about this sultan’s rule.
The sultan in question, the aforementioned “clean-shaven youth with cropped hair” was in fact al-Mustansir Billah, the eight Fatimid caliph and, critically given Nasir’s own beliefs, Ismaili imam. Nasir was actually in Egypt for a few years, but we can be quite confident in our identification of the relevant caliph because he’d held that title since 1036, when he was only seven years old, and he was going to stay holding it, though not without difficulties or complications, all the way until his death in 1094.
Al Mustansir would actually oversee the crumbling of the Fatimid dynasty and the loss of power to military commanders who he invited in to deal with a fractured state that was beyond his control. That multitude of horses that had paraded with him at the opening of the canal would be gone, leaving only one for himself. There would be loss of territory and what amounted to civil war. The Nile would fail to flood and there would be punishing rounds of famine and plague, bad enough that the particular period gets its own unpromising title, the “Mustansirite Hardship,” named after the caliph himself. There would be, as Kirsten Thomson writes, “desperation [both] within and outside of the palaces as Cairo fell into anarchy and starvation.”
But you would never know that in reading Nasir. All of that trouble was still a little ways away, the eventual arrival of Salah ad-Din to put a definitive end to it all, still more than a century away. Al Mustansir was still only 18 years old or so when Nasir arrived, and at least from our guide’s rosy perspective, things could hardly have been better.
Al Mustansir’s was a realm to which came, quote, “princes from all over the world—the Maghreb, the Yemen, Byzantium, Slavia, Nubia, and Abyssinia…. The sons of the Chosroes of Daylam and their mother [had] also come [there], and the sons of Georgian kings, Daylamite princes, the sons of the khagan of Turkistan, and people of other ranks and stations, such as scholars, literati, poets, and jurisprudents, all of whom [had] fixed stipends.”
Horrific discord may have been on the horizon, but for now, Nasir wrote, “The security and welfare of the people of Egypt [has] reached a point that the drapers, moneychangers, and jewelers do not even lock their shops—they only lower a net across the front, and no one tampers with anything.”
He gave examples of justice served by the caliph, generous and merciful, and of the well-funded system of judges in his realm “so that the people need not fear venality from the bench.” He spoke of how, quote, “in all towns and villages, mosque expenses, such as lamp oil, carpets, mats and rugs, salaries for custodians, janitors, muezzins, and so on, [were] handled by the sultan’s agents,” and spoke to the caliph’s maintenance of “things pertaining to the house of god,” a theme that would be further emphasized when it came time to speak of the caliph’s support for the pilgrimage, along with Nasir’s participation, but that is more a matter for next time, when we continue the story of Nasir Khusraw.
We will leave things there for now. I’ll be back soon with that next episode. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.