Bulgar ruler receiving Byzantine ambassadors - Wikimedia
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Questionable movies aside, the writing of Ahmad ibn Fadlan is probably best known for its vivid, sex-and-violence account of a Viking funeral. That’s generally the bit that gets all the attention, in the way that Vikings, sex, and violence all tend to do, but those actually weren’t the only funerary traditions our traveller described. We’re going to get to the more well-known funeral next episode, but before we get started here on this, ibn Fadlan part 2, I want to highlight that other one, the less famous ibn Fadlan funeral, the cult favourite. This is the treatment of the dead that ibn Fadlan reports among the Ghuzziyyah Turks.
It starts with those of failing health, this clearly not being a society in which you want to reveal weakness - part of me can’t help but think of the “bring out your dead” scene in Quest for the Holy Grail. It starts with men who appear to edge towards death, and in my translation at least, ibn Fadlan is referring specifically to men, and even more specifically to men of some amount of property. The impoverished are abandoned to death on the plain.
As death nears, the other members of the household keep their distance. Only the slaves approach to take him to a separate tent, there to recover or there to die.
If he does die, and we’re assuming here that he does, then a trench is dug. The dead man is seated there, dressed in his clothes and his bow at his side. A wooden cup of liquor is placed in his hand, and a wooden container with more of the same is set before him. His money and wealth is installed all around him, and a roof is constructed over him, topped by a clay yurt. If he has killed others in combat, then figures of those who he killed are carved in wood, his retainers, they say, in the world after. His horses are slaughtered, as many as he may have owned, whether it be one or one hundred, and their meat is eaten. But their heads, legs, tails, and hide are preserved and nailed onto wooden frames. On these horses, they say, he will ride to the world after.
Sometimes, the killing of the horses is delayed. It is not carried out immediately, as it should be. Maybe there’s a sense among the people that the deceased does not need or perhaps even deserve those horses; maybe there are more pressing matters at hand. In such cases an elder must be called on to shame those involved.
“I have seen the dead man in a dream,” they’ll say, “and he told me this. ‘My companions ride before me, and I struggle to catch up. My feet are broken and bloodied from the effort, and I am left here all alone.’”
Once the people have done as they ought to on the dead man’s behalf, then the elder will speak to them again.
“I have seen him again,” they’ll say. “He told me he has caught up with those who went before him. He has healed, and he has recovered.”
This is what Ahamad ibn Fadlan has to say of the funeral practices of the Ghuzziyyah, otherwise known as the Oghuz Turks. We’ll be seeing much more of them in just a moment.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that explores that medieval world through the stories of its travellers. As is by this point tradition, this is the part of the podcast where I point out the degrees of deep satisfaction that stem from supporting the podcast on Patreon, that you can do so for as little as a dollar a month - there is no maximum - and that you can do so at patreon.com/humancircus.
And now, back to the story.
The story this time is of course that of ibn Fadlan and his journey north from Baghdad in the early 920s. Last episode, we set the scene, established the context, and followed him and his companions on their plunge into disturbingly cold weather. I talked about how those companions had been made fewer in number by the departure of the jurists and instructors that had gone with them. I also noted that they were going without the money they were expecting, that they were doing so, rather more troublingly, without the money that their soon-to-be host was expecting.
But they were going.
We left them as they dried their clothes by the fire, where the translator noted that the passage may in fact refer to their fanning the fire alight with their clothes. After that, the march ahead was a strenuous one.
They were travelling quickly and with as much energy as they could muster, riding from midnight until the midday or afternoon prayer, when they rested, which is quite a schedule. 15 nights of that and they’d reached a large, rocky mountain, streams feeding a lake at its base, and on the other side of that were the Ghuzziyyah.
The Ghuzziyyah, or Oghuz, were a Turkic tribe, and, aside from ibn Fadlan’s comparison of a person’s speech to a starling that I mentioned last episode, they’re our first opportunity to see him encounter people who are strange to him, to see how he reacts to them and what details he recounts.
As for the “how he reacts,” the reaction is, to say the least, not positive.
“They lead wretched lives,” he says. “They are like roaming asses.”
They were nomads who lived in tents of fur, and more seriously, they were not monotheists. Though they might be heard to declare out loud that there was no God but God and Muhammed was his messenger, that, ibn Fadlan said, was less out of belief than it was a way of befriending passing Muslims. He reported that they swore to the heavens when something bad happened, but he said that they did not really worship anything at all or, for that matter, base their thinking on reason.
They were, he seemed generally to have felt, quite filthy in their habits. They did not wash themselves when it was suitable to do so, when ritual cleaning was necessary like after urination for example. He says they chose not to have contact with water at all, especially during the winter, which, given ibn Fadlan’s experience with the frozen beard, does not sound as outlandish as it otherwise might. And they did not seem to appreciate others having contact with water either. Muslim travellers had to perform their ritual cleansing in secret so that they weren’t accosted with shouts that they had put something in the water and were casting a spell.
They also had to be aware that other aspects of life might not be quite what they were used to. They were likely to be surprised by the way the women might go about uncovered before men, and this wasn’t about veiling the face or, more generally, the head.
This was best illustrated by an encounter that ibn Fadlan and some of his fellow travellers had one day as they stopped and visited in a tent. They were there with their hosts, husband and wife, when she happened to casually pull aside her clothes and scratch at her crotch. It seems to have been an unremarkable enough thing to do from her perspective, there in the comfort of her home. For the travellers though it was quite a different experience. They averted their eyes with exclamations of “God forgive us!” but the woman’s husband just laughed at their discomfort, saying in effect that seeing and touching were very different matters.
Ibn Fadlan takes the opportunity to tell us that illicit sex, though he doesn’t specifiy exactly what that entailed, was most harshly punished. The culprit was tied between two trees that had been forcefully bent together. The trees were released, and when they snapped back upright, the offender was snapped back with them in two different directions, and torn apart. Odd as it may sound, it is a method that I think might have come up on this podcast before, but I really can’t remember where. It is recorded in Roman sources though and indeed in much more recent ones too.
But ibn Fadlan’s record of the Ghuzziyyah wasn’t all about ripping people in half, jarring personal habits, and poor hygiene, regarding all of which, it must be said that we are seeing these people through the eyes of a man just passing through, and a man from an imperial centre of power and culture who surely saw this as very much a place on the periphery of the world he knew. We do see, aside from all that, a great value placed on the role of the host. Ibn Fadlan mentions that a traveller would have a yurt and sheep provided for him, that a total stranger could arrive, announce himself as a guest, and ask for camels, horses, and dirhams. He could be certain that all he asked would be given to him.
And he could be just as certain that all he was loaned would be returned. A host would travel for days to reclaim what is his from a wayward borrower, would ask after his quarry on the road, would, if the man was dead, take exactly what he was owed from the deceased’s caravan, would, if he had successfully disappeared, take it from his coreligionists. “He was a Muslim like you,” the man might say. “You go get it from him.”
Navigating this world, our guide was surprised by the way the Ghuzziyyah made decisions by consultation, and how even the most worthless among them might overturn that decision. But he found, as ever, that gift-giving was what smoothed the way forward.
The first leader they encountered, a local man whose power likely did not extend very far, told them their passage was impossible, unheard of, it could not be done. But with the presentation of a caftan and a woven cloth, along with some flatbreads, raisins, and nuts, it was entirely possible. He thanked them and allowed them to go on their way.
The next morning though, more gifts would be required, this time to quite a different character. The whole caravan, reportedly 3,000 mounts and 5,000 men, was waved down by a single man, a quote, “despicable figure, unkempt, and really quite repulsive - a man of no worth at all.”
“None of you will pass,” he told them, and somewhat absurdly but perhaps out fear that he had armed companions very close by, they did not disagree, saying only in protest that they were friends of the kudharkin, a deputy of the king or khan, but this fellow accosting them was not impressed by this. Not at all.
“Kudharkin who?” he laughed. “Do I not shit on the beard of the kudharkin?” And then he demanded bread, which they gave to him and were allowed by this extremely belligerent individual to pass with the parting words, “Proceed. I have spared you out of pity.” Maybe he had.
And so they proceeded, leaving that “despicable figure” behind them, and they made their way to one last meeting in lands of the Ghuzziyah, this one with a man named Atrak, an accomplished rider who ibn Fadlan saw shoot a goose in flight from horseback, and, in the wording of the translation I’m using, a field marshal, a commander of a large retinue with a great number of attendants and large tents. He held a feast for them with his cousins and other members of his household. He gave them horses to ride and sheep for the slaughter, and they gave him gifts: clothing, millet, raisins, nuts, and pepper. And they watched his wife, who had been his father’s wife, take some of the gifts, along with other foods, and bury them in the ground. Through an interpreter, they heard her words: “This is a gift for al-Qataghan, the father of Atrak. The Arabs gave it to him.”
So far, it seemed, so good.
During their time with Atrak, the visitors were received at an audience in his yurt where they presented more gifts along with a letter directing him to embrace Islam. This, he said he would consider. He would give them his answer on their way back through. But then there was no guarantee they would be coming back through. There was some question as to whether they would actually be leaving Atrak’s territory in the first place. That was still to be decided.
The ones making the decision were a group of four neighbouring commanders that Atrak called together one day.
“These are the envoys from the king of the Arabs,” he told them. “I cannot rightfully allow them to go any further without consulting you.”
A fair amount of what his consultants had to say had to do with the Khazars, the on again, off again, allies/enemies of the Ghuzziyyah. In the late 800s, the two had been allied in the wars against the Pechenegs, but then with the next Khazar ruler, the Ghuzziyyah, along with the Byzantines and Pechenegs, were at war with them. Ten years after ibn Fadlan’s journey, they’d again fight on the same side, but as we’ll see, the Khazars at this point had Ghuzziyyah prisoners, having been at war with them just the year before.
The first of Atrak’s guests to speak was blind and lame and had a withered arm, but unfortunately for the travellers, he was also the most important and respected. He voiced his suspicion that these envoys were actually part of the caliph’s plot against them, that they were really on their way to the Khazars, there to press them into an attack on the Ghuzziyyah. The only option, he concluded, was to dismember the envoys and take what they had.
So that was a bad start, but then the others didn’t entirely agree. No, said the second. They shouldn’t dismember them, but they definitely should take absolutely everything they had and send them back naked the way they had come, potentially also a death sentence given the harsh environment.
The third had other ideas again. The visitors should be seized and held prisoner to then be ransomed against those Ghuzziyyah taken prisoner by the Khazars.
None of them, so far as the envoys were concerned, were good options.
For seven days, seven - I only imagine - extremely unpleasant days, ibn Fadlan and the others waited for the decision. They waited, as he put it, “in the jaws of death.” They waited seven days, and then the decision came through. They were allowed to leave.
No doubt extremely relieved by the result, they left a robe of honour and other gifts to that highly esteemed man who’d wanted them dismembered, and tunics, pepper, millet, and flatbreads for his colleagues. And then they left. After this quick break, we’ll follow them.
…
Leaving Atrak’s territory, they were northeast of the Caspian Sea now, still heading north. They crossed a river on camel-hide rafts. It was a difficult operation in which the hides were stretched out over circular saddle frames before being loaded with goods and groups of people in 4s, 5s, and 6s and then propelled across with makeshift paddles, the round rafts spinning in circles as they beat furiously at the water. Around them, camels and horses were driven into the water to swim, and ahead, armed soldiers crossed first for fear of an ambush. There was little more vulnerable than a caravan in the middle of crossing a river, and they were concerned about attacks from the Bashghird.
There were more rivers after that, and ibn Fadlan lists them one after another, saying they were mighty rivers all, and each one they crossed this way.
They encountered a people known as the Pechenegs, the Bajanak our guide calls them, and he was not impressed. They were, he said, a “vivid brown colour, shave[d] their beards,” and unlike the Ghuzziyyah they’d just left, some of whom, he said, might own “ten thousand horses and a hundred thousand head of sheep,” these people “live[d] in miserable poverty.”
Ibn Fadlan gives little further detail as to the Pechenegs. He spent a day with them, he says. He moved along. But miserable as they may have seemed to him, they were a force to be reckoned with. Earlier in the 10th century, the Russian Primary Chronicle has them making their first raids the Rus, and not much later in it than ibn Fadlan, around mid-century, it was going to be said by a Byzantine emperor that the Rus could not come to Constantinople, “either for war or for peace,” not without peace with the Pechenegs. The Rus could try to come on their boats by river, he said, but the Pechenegs could get them.
Crossing rivers could be a dangerous business, but for ibn Fadlan, it was not the Pechenegs that were cause for concern.
First of all it was the rivers themselves. As he and his fellow travellers journey on, they crossed many waterways, each duly listed, but he says one was worst of all. “This was the biggest and mightiest river we had seen,” he wrote, “and had the strongest current.” Ibn Fadlan himself watched as a raft capsized and everyone on it drowned, and that 4-6 aboard were not alone. Horses drowned; camels drowned; “a great many died.” “It took the greatest effort to get across.” But get across they did, if with a somewhat diminished “they.”
The other danger, which I’ve already alluded to, was more of a people problem, and the people in question were the Bashghird, the people they’d been worried about when crossing river before, the people ibn Fadlan clearly considered to sit at the ugly end of a kind of barbarian-civilization dynamic, the ones he referred to as “the wickedest, filthiest, and most ferocious of the Turks.” His assessment, obviously, not mine.
The Bashghird took no prisoners when they attacked, only heads. They shaved their beards and ate lice. Once, ibn Fadlan witnessed one of them fish about in his clothing until he found one and promptly cracked it open and licked it up. “Delicious!” he said to ibn Fadlan, or something similar, when he saw our traveller watching him. Or at least that’s what ibn Fadlan says.
He says they wore a carved wooden phallus about their neck, that they kissed it and spoke to it in worship before battle, acknowledging no other creator. But there was clearly more to their religious vision than just penises because some, he says, acknowledged twelve lords: of winter, summer, rain, wind, trees, people, horses, water, night, day, death, and earth. A thirteenth, the Lord of the Sky was greatest but acted in agreement with the others.
The travellers noticed that each clan among the Bashghird worshipped something different, something aside from the lords and carvings. For one it might be snakes, or fish, or cranes. That last group said that they had once been broken in battle and already in flight when cranes had called out behind them, causing their enemy to turn and run.
“These are his actions,” they said. “He has routed our enemies,” and since that day, they’d worshiped cranes.
Between lords, cranes, and this “He” they talk about, however that may have been treated by time and translation, it all sounds like they had quite a lot more going on than just penises, with that “sky lord” likely something we would now label Tengrism and sharing some beliefs and practices with those of the Mongols for example.
But uncredited religious complexities aside, what of all those worries as to the Bashghird? Were they born out? It seems not, at least not based on ibn Fadlan’s silence here on the issue. The danger these people posed seems to have been building in the traveller’s mind, but now he and his comrades left their territory in peace and apparently unscathed, and they crossed still more rivers, eight he lists here with “two, three, or four days travel from one river to the next.” The king of the Saqalibah was near. This was the man whose petition they were answering, for “Saqalibah,” a medieval Arabic term for Slavs, was indeed how he referred to the Bulgars, and he was close, only a few days away.
They were a day and a half out from their destination when they met their escort, the king’s brothers, sons, and four lords of his lands with millet and meat, bread and welcome. Everyone was very happy to see them, including, when he came out himself, the king.
He met them at two farsakhs’ distance from their goal, and “farsakh” is a unit of measurement for which I’ve seen some wildly different conversions depending on the time period and source but was historically tied to the distance one could could travel in a set time, like describing something as a day’s march away or two hours walk. In one book, I found it defined as “the distance at which a long-sighted man can see a camel and discern whether it be white or black," or from another source, that at which one could hear a drum.
At whatever exact distance he came out to greet them, the king did so with honours, descending from his horse to prostrate himself before them and give thanks to God, scattering dirhams from his sleeve over them, and having yurts set out to house them. It was May of 922, and they had been travelling 70 days since al-Jurjaniyyah. Now, for a few days at least, they could rest, while the king gathered his subjects to hear the letter of the caliph.
With that reading, ibn Fadlan will really give a sense of the occasion, with standards unfurled and the king dressed all in black, with a turban placed on his head. He’ll also show us more of his own role in all of this, his own task. A lot of this account concerns the doings of a collective “we,” but here at the reading it’s very much ibn Fadlan the “I” that steps forward.
“We are not permitted to remain seated during the reading of the letter,” he announced to those assembled.
It was up to him to read such documents aloud, and to see that all was done properly, that protocols were followed and practices correct, even out here among the Bulghars.
Everyone stood including the king, “big and corpulent,” ibn Fadlan noted. Then, he read the letter, all of it translated by an interpreter. As he reached the words “Peace be upon you! On your behalf, I praise God - there is no God but Him!” he paused, directing his audience, “Return the greetings of the Commander of the Faithful,” and they did, every one of them. As he reached the end of the letter, they all roared aloud, “God Almighty!” loud enough that the ground beneath them shook with it.
Next, he read the letter from the vizier, this time telling the king to sit, which the king did, sitting, listening, and then, as the letter finished, showered with coins by his companions. Ibn Fadlan then brought out gifts for the king’s wife, pearls, cloths, and medicines, a robe of honour which she received and was then showered with coins by her companions. There was a lot of convivial throwing of coin happening, and everyone seems to have been content with how the visit was going.
Later, they would all be invited to the king’s tent. They saw him seated on a throne covered in Byzantine silk, on his right, his kings, and before him, his sons; they took their place on his left. He called for a table, and it was carried in to him set with roasted meat and a knife. The king sliced off one piece and ate, then second and a third. Then he cut another and handed it towards someone, a table placed before them to receive it. None took meat before he had, none took save from him, none ate from any table but their own, and when the king would finish, everyone would take their leftovers back to their own tent to finish their meal there.
Here, the king called for a honey drink when the meat was finished, one which he either drank night and day or took a day and a night to make - the source is apparently a little unclear. The king raised a cupful and drained it.
Standing, he proclaimed, “Such is my joy in my patron the Commander of the Faithful, may God prolong his life!” and all stood with him. Three times he drank, stood, and spoke, and three times the company stood with him. Then, they parted for the evening. All, so far, was well.
It was well, but as is often the case in these stories the issue of money and the gifting of it was going to become a problem. It was three days after they’d exchanged ceremonial greetings and feasted together that the king called again for ibn Fadlan. This time, there would be no showers of coins. Indeed, it was the very absence of coins that he wanted to talk about. Calling ibn Fadlan before him, he commanded him to be seated and then hurled the caliph’s letter at him.
“Who brought this letter?” he demanded, and ibn Fadlan agreed that it had been him.
“And this one?” the king asked, now throwing the vizier’s letter at him. Again, ibn Fadlan could only agree that it had been him.
What, the king then asked, had been done with money they referred to?
He’d heard, one way or another, of the 4,000 dinars that the caliph had intended to be his. He’d heard somehow of the efforts that had been made to keep them from him, and he was not pleased, not at all pleased with ibn Fadlan’s explanation that he and the others had left early for fear of missing the chance to come at all, that the money had been set to be brought after, that the greatest effort had been expended to see that it did.
None of it was enough. None of it made sense. Why hadn’t the money simply been given to the king’s representative? He could have brought it easily enough. Instead, he had all these guests, but none of the money. It was quite beyond vexing, and the king made his feelings entirely clear. Gone was the agreeable man who’d followed every one of ibn Fadlan’s directions. Now, he bellowed at his visitor with a voice that seemed to come from out of a barrel, and he placed the responsibility very much with ibn Fadlan himself.
“Tell him,” he said to his interpreter, “that I do not acknowledge any of the others. I acknowledge only you. They are not Arabs. If my master [the caliph] thought that they could have read the official letter as eloquently as you, he would not have sent you to keep it safe for me, read it, and hear my response. I do not expect to receive one single dirham from anyone but you. Produce the money. This would be the best thing for you to do.
Ibn Fadlan took his leave, shaken, “dazed and in a state of terror.” He was, he said, “overawed” by his audience with the king, by his physical size as much as anything, it seems. Coming away from the intimidating encounter, ibn Fadlan brought together his companions, telling them what had passed between him and the king.
“I warned you about this,” he told them, as indeed he had. Not that it had done much good. For all his concerns, here he was, the only one the king wanted to talk to yes, but also the only one to whom the king was going to be looking for money, a substantial amount of money that he would have no way of producing out of thin air. It was all a little stressful.
And that’s where we’ll leave our traveller this time, caught in an awkward and potentially dangerous predicament, one he’d very much anticipated but still could little about. Next episode, we’re going to get into the details of ibn Fadlan’s time among the “Saqalibah,” and I’ll probably get to that famous Viking funeral too.
If you are listening to this on the Transcontinental Friars Patreon feed, then please do keep listening, as in a moment, I’ll be describing a process of conversion with some similarities to that we’re encountering with ibn Fadlan and the Saqalibah king and talking about some of the factors in that ruler’s decision.
And if you aren’t, thank you for listening. I’ll be back soon with part three in this ibn Fadlan series, and I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
Ahmad ibn Fadlan. Mission to the Volga, translated by James E. Montgomery. New York University Press, 2017.
Ibn Fadlan and the Land of Darkness: Arab Travellers in the Far North, translated and with an introduction by Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone. Penguin, 2012.
Medieval Islamic Civilization: An Encyclopedia, edited by Josef W. Meri. Routledge, 2005.
Bukharaev, Ravil. Islam in Russia: The Four Seasons. Routledge, 2014.
Curta, Florin. Southeastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 500-1250. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. Simon and Schuster, 2020.
Le Strange, Guy. The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur. Cosimo Classics, 2010.
Romano, John F. Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Vernadsky, George. Kievan Russia. Yale University Press, 1973.