Alexander the Great builds a wall to contain Gog and Magog (wikimedia)
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In the early period of Ahmad ibn Fadlan’s stay with the Bulghars, he would hear the muezzin sing out the call to prayer, and he would hear the phrases uttered twice. In keeping with his role as an expert in protocol and procedure, both diplomatic and religious, if such things can here be separated, he sought to make corrections.
“These phrases are announced only once in the realm of your patron the Commander of the Faithful,” he told the king, and for a time this correction was accepted. For several days it was, while that king called in ibn Fadlan to confront him over that missing money. He did not initially accept that it would not now be forthcoming.
Once the king did arrive at that acceptance though, he sent word to the muezzin that he should just carry on with his previous practice, for what he had been doing was perfectly fine. Except that ibn Fadlan still didn’t think so. The visitor shouted for the muezzin to stop, the muezzin took the matter to the king, and the king called ibn Fadlan and his companions in for some pointed discussion, some very one-sided discussion.
“Ask him,” began the king, for he was directing his words through an interpreter. He asked first if such and such a prayer was permissible, first gaining ibn Fadlan’s agreement that it was so and that there was indeed consensus on the issue, then moving on to the next question. What was the traveller’s opinion of someone who gave to one group of people money that was intended for another, money that was, furthermore, intended for a weak, beset, and practically enslaved people. What did he think of such a person?
“Impermissible!” ibn Fadlan responded, for the king was clearly describing a very wicked person indeed.
In our traveller’s telling, he really does seem to be allowing himself to be walked into something here.
Next, the Bulghar king asked if there should be any reason that he and his people should have any fear for invasion from the caliph, and they both agreed that there was not, the distance between the two of them being so great, and the hostile peoples so numerous.
And yet, said the king to the interpreter, and yet, “Tell him, by God - here I am, in this far-off land where we are now, you and I both, yet I still fear my patron the Commander of the Faithful. I fear his curse, should he learn anything displeasing about me. I would die on the spot, though his kingdom is a great distance away. Yet you,” and here I imagine him really fixing his stare on ibn Fadlan, perhaps some discomfort visible on our guide’s face, maybe a little increase in background music volume. “Yet you who eat his bread, wear his clothes, and look on him constantly, have betrayed him in the matter of a letter he commanded you to bring to me, to my weak people. You have betrayed the Muslims. I shall accept no instruction from you on how to practice religion until a sincere counselor arrives. I will accept instruction from such a man.”
At this, ibn Fadlan and his companions were silenced, struck dumb. They could think of nothing now to say.
But they were probably going to need to come up with something, for they wouldn’t be going home just yet.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast which covers, and this will shock you, journeys in the medieval world. And this is the part of the podcast where I point out to you that I do have a Patreon, and that if you appreciate the podcast and are in a position to do so, there are 1, 3, and 5 dollar options there to support it, and me, and they’re all very much appreciated. They all make quite a difference on my end, and I want to thank Adam Boardman and D Duncombe for signing up most recently. Thank you very much to you both!
And now, back to the story, back to the Ahmad ibn Fadlan story.
As I mentioned a moment ago, we are getting back into things just as the, quote, “King of the Saqalibah,” the Bulghar ruler, deals with the unpleasant news that he will not be receiving any of that money from his guests, and as ibn Fadlan and the rest of those guests deal with the king.
Somewhat surprisingly, that did not go as badly as you might have expected. Sure he was hostile or aloof in regards to the others, but with ibn Fadlan, he was outright affable. He began, in his booming voice, to address him as Abu Bakr the Veracious, the Truthful, a peculiar and probably humorous comparison to the first caliph. Maybe it was his way with words that caused him to be so singled out, his displays of knowledge as to how things should be done, or just the way he carried himself among these strange people. Maybe, the Bulghar ruler simply enjoyed teasing him as to his failure to follow through on the contents of the caliph’s letter.
It’s hard to say exactly how ibn Fadlan felt about it all, but I like to imagine him somewhat bemused by this aggressive display of good cheer, this merriment from the large man who he’d angered and who had so intimidated him, bemused and surely a little uneasy. Things had, as I often find myself saying, started well enough, what with the symbolic transportation of the Abbasid Caliphate to this outpost with black banners and a black robe and turban for their host, what with their host having, since their arrival, taken on the name Ja’far ibn ‘Abdallah, a name which distanced him from his non-Muslim father while bringing him closer to the caliph. And the now ibn ‘Abdallah was still kind enough in manner to ibn Fadlan himself. But was his kindness concealing something more unpleasant?
Maybe it would have, but then ibn ‘Abdallah perhaps did not actually need the money quite so much as he’d made out. He had, our guide observed, “an extensive kingdom, many belongings, and considerable wealth from taxes.” Ibn Fadlan had seen that though these people lived in yurts, ibn ‘Abdallah’s own was large enough to hold over a thousand people, was carpeted in Armenian rugs, and featured his “throne bedecked with Byzantine silk.” Why then, ibn Fadlan asked, had he petitioned the caliph for money with which to build a fortress?
“I could see that the realm of Islam was flourishing,” replied ibn ‘Abdallah, “and that the wealth of the Muslims was acquired lawfully. That is why I asked for it. If I had wanted to build a fort using my own silver and gold, I could have.”
So that probably took quite a bit of the sting out of the lost money. It was, as ever, much easier to be jovial about missing income when you could afford it, which maybe this man could.
And I say “maybe,” because maybe what ibn ‘Abdallah had told him wasn’t entirely true. Maybe it was only an exercise in face-saving, and he was in fact not all capable of constructing the defences he desired. Maybe he wasn’t really able to continue opposing the Khazars or, as I have seen argued, did not actually need to resist them so long as he paid his tribute. It’s worth noting on this point that he would not be obliterated by the waning Khazar power, not now or later, and in some thirty years his people would be coining dirhams that indicated an independent Bulghar ruler, not one subservient to the Khazars.
Whatever the truth of the matter, ibn Fadlan was going to be able to get a feel for his new surroundings while being only occasionally - maybe - threatened by what ibn ‘Abdallah might do. For this traveller so far from Baghdad, there were many new things to get a feel for.
There was, first of all, the food and drink, largely millet and horse meat but also barley and wheat, the latter of quite poor quality because of the foul-smelling soil. There was honey wine by the jug and hazel trees from which a sweet and intoxicating sap was drawn. There were apples, dark and “more acidic than wine vinegar,” whose name held something in common with the word for female slaves, though exactly how they’re related is unclear. There were also berries, absolutely delicious ones that ibn Fadlan compared to seedless pomegranate, seedless pomegranate seeds I’m tempted to say. He happened upon them growing in a little thicket of trees, and for the rest of his stay he searched them out as best he could.
Wheat aside, it was not the produce itself that ibn Fadlan seems to have disliked so much as it was the storage and cooking of it. Of storage, he says there was none, or at least there was none that he approved of, none that really worked. They dug holes, deep holes, deep as wells; however, he says, it was only days before the food in those holes began to smell and become inedible, which is a little puzzling given that underground food storage, like a root cellar for example, is a pretty tried and true method of food preservation - not sure what exactly what was going wrong in this case.
But once the food was out of the ground, there was also another problem, at least where ibn Fadlan’s palate was concerned, and, to be fair, I’d very probably agree with him. The problem was one of oil. The Bulghars did not use “olive oil, sesame oil, or any other vegetable oil. They use[d] fish oil.” And their food suffered as a result. Everything “they prepare[d] in it [was] unwholesome and greasy.” And I sympathize with ibn Fadlan. Horse and millet in fish oil doesn’t top my list of dishes I’m looking to try, but then that is, and always has been, part of the experience of travel. He was just going to have to make do with delicious berries and keep down the fish oil cooking as best he could.
This land he was visiting was one where the sound of howling dogs was considered auspicious. It was one where snakes were plentiful, frighteningly so, with more than ten sometimes found coiled round a single branch, but they were considered unremarkable. Ibn Fadlan reacted in terror one day when the large trunk of a fallen tree shifted before him; he saw it slither off among the trees, but the king, when told, was not impressed. “Have no fear,” he said. “It will do you no harm.” The traveller had a lot to get used to.
There were the local customs, not all of which had any direct effect on him. For example, a man on the march who urinated while wearing his arms and armour, peeing his armour I guess you could say, was stripped of that armour, his weapons, and everything else he had on him, all of it taken as plunder. The correct thing to do was to put your arms aside while peeing and so avoid such punishment. But either way, better to commit a washroom faux pax than to have killed someone. For that you could be boxed up and suspended from a tree with three loaves of bread and a jug of water.
“We set him between heaven and earth, exposed to the rain and the sun,” they would say. “Perhaps God will have pity on him.”
The condemned man would really have to hope that God would, because the people who put him there certainly wouldn’t. He was going to stay there until his body rotted away and its parts were scattered by the wind. And fair enough, you might be thinking. He had killed someone, but no matter your opinions as to capital punishment, which, just in case it sounds otherwise, I’m against, this next part will surely seem more than a little harsh.
It wasn’t just criminals who had reason to fear lest they be put to death. There were those here who would notice someone particularly intelligent and useful and say, “This man is fit for the service of our lord. Let us send him to him.” And that apparently meant hanging him from a tree and killing him. It had happened to one clever man from afar who had travelled among them, ibn Fadlan had been told, and this information could not have made him feel good. For he does indeed seem to have been a clever man.
He was a capable traveller of substantial endurance. He had navigated the varied lands and peoples between his point of departure at Baghdad and his destination, here among the Bulghars, north of the Caspian. He had shown himself to be effective in navigating a difficult situation and in providing religious instruction to those Bulghars, teaching one group the manner in which to pray, a man two surahs in which he delighted, and the king and his people the proper way to do things, the correct ordering of an inheritance for example.
The death of that clever man from afar may well have been a fabrication on the part of his hosts, perhaps an effort to intimidate him or maybe a little joke at this outsider’s expense, but real or not, ibn Fadlan was not killed and sent to serve their lord. He was free to travel, or at least to follow his host as he travelled, and to see this land. And he saw some interesting things. He was struck by the incredible volume of lightning he observed, how when it touched a place, it rendered it unapproachable, the site seen as having “incurred divine wrath” and promptly abandoned.
Ibn Fadlan “lost count of the number of marvels [he] witnessed in [these] realms.” He was, for example, struck by the sky, the way it changed, and what he witnessed in it.
First, there was the nature of night and day there in that place. As he moved north, these lands of course did not follow the rhythms he would have been accustomed to, and it startled him. He describes chatting in the yurt of ibn ‘Abdallah’s tailor, a man who was interestingly also from Baghdad, and he did not linger long inside. He had entered just as the day began to darken and remained only long enough to, as he puts it, “read halfway through one seventh of the Qur’an,” halfway through a manzil, a portion of those into which the Qur’an can be divided to be read over seven days. It was not a long conversation. He was listening out for the nightfall call to prayer, and when he heard it, he left. But outside, he found, much to his astonishment, that the sun was coming up.
He rushed over to the muezzin in order to clarify what had happened. Which prayer had it been that he’d just heard? And if it was indeed the daybreak, then what had become of the night? He was told the night was short enough that it and the dawn prayer ran together. He was told that the muezzin had not slept for a month for fear he would miss the morning prayer, presumably not slept during the night rather than not all.
It was a lot to take in for our traveller, but his observations confirmed what the man had told him. The nights were short, and then, as he remained in the region, grew to outstrip the days. He could grow used to that, but it was not the length of the night alone that startled him. After this short break, we’ll find him confronting something in the sky that would, I think, be even more troubling.
...
It happened early in the stay of ibn Fadlan among the Bulghars, early one evening. The first sign that something unusual was occurring was that the horizon grew bright red in colour, and then came the noise. It was a great uproar, as if an army was about to come upon them in force, as if “the din of many voices” all rang out at once from above. He looked up and saw the red bursts of clouds with voices booming from them, saw them gradually taking on the forms of soldiers and their steeds, saw them waving swords and spears, and saw a second group of cloudborne cavalry appear and charge violently upon the first.
These visions in the sky were clear enough to ibn Fadlan that he could pick out the details, the individual animals among them, the shine of a sword, the faces of men. They were clear enough that he and his fellow-travellers reacted in extreme and quite understandable fear, calling upon God to protect and preserve them before this horror.
For an hour, they watched as the battle raged across the skies above them with no sign of abating, and when it had finished, they turned, no doubt exhausted, to ask their host what it was that they had just seen, what was it that had just happened that had so terrified the travellers while the locals had just laughed at them. What was that? What he told them was what he said that he himself had been told. Those figures who fought in the sky were “two groups of jinn, believers and unbelievers, who [did] battle every evening,” and had done so for as long as anyone could remember.
I do wonder exactly how this was put, what this Bulghar leader described that ibn Fadlan then understood as jinn, or if indeed ibn ‘Abdallah did call them jinn specifically, why he did so. Was that what he, living north of the Caspian and recently converted to Islam, really knew them as, or, as some readers have thought, did he deliberately frame this occurrence in the way that he thought would most intimidate and unsettle ibn Fadlan?
I assume, as people generally do, that what ibn Fadlan was looking up and seeing for the first time was the northern lights, the aurora borealis, but that hardly makes the experience any less dramatic. He was properly in awe of what was happening, standing in total disproportion before something much greater and grander than himself, something inexplicable and terrifying. And then, when he asked for some account, it was put to him that these were jinn, hardly an explanation that could have reassured him, maybe one that was chosen precisely for that reason. Whatever they truly thought it was, the event clearly left his hosts largely unbothered. They, of course, were used to it.
As for ibn Fadlan, he seems to have accepted the explanation he was given. He had after all seen the armies in the sky with his own eyes and heard them too. There was little else it could be.
And he’d also see something else, this time not in the sky above but there on the ground. You see, he had heard from one of the men he travelled with that there was, there in their Bulghar host’s territory, a giant. It was the sort of thing you’d ask about when you arrived - is there a giant here?
He did, and there was.
When asked about the giant, Ibn ‘Abdallah confirmed that it was true. “Yes, he was living in our country,” he said, “but he is dead. He was not one of our people, nor was he an ordinary man. His story is as follows.”
Ibn ‘Abdallah told them then of a day when a party of merchants had rushed to him in a panic. They complained to him of a man who had arrived at the banks of a nearby river, a man who so terrified them that they said if he was indeed living nearby then they would all need to migrate.
So ibn ‘Abdallah had gone to have a look, and he’d been no less unnerved than the merchants had before him. The giant measured 12 cubits tall, 12 forearms. It was the type of height that could worry a person, especially when paired with a head the size of a large cooking pot, and attempts at communication got nowhere. No matter what was said to him, he simply would not respond.
Despite these factors or, I suppose, because of them, the giant was brought back to live among the Bulghars, but it didn’t work out. And when I say it didn’t work out, I do not mean that there was a clash of personalities or incompatibility with how these people chose to live. I mean that “boys who looked at him died, and pregnant women miscarried. His hands would crush to death anyone he took hold of.” It really didn’t work out, so the giant was hung from a tall tree, a very tall one, his bones left to lie where they fell. And would ibn Fadlan like to see them?
He would, and he did. He said that he rode out into the woods with the Bulghar ruler. He saw the skeleton there, its “head … like a bees’ nest” and its ribs, legs, and arms like the boughs of a palm tree. He went away “filled with wonder,” and he went away with ibn ‘Abdallah’s explanation of who and what this giant was, an explanation that ibn ‘Abdallah said he had himself received when he’d written away in consultation.
The giant was said to be “one of the Gog and Magog, who live[d] three months away … in a state of absolute nakedness,” separated by the sea and “hemmed in by mountains on all other sides.” Behind their gated wall, they ate from peculiar fish that washed up on their shores, and they waited to “swarm forth into the inhabited lands” once God had breached the walls and the seas dried up. This particular example of their kind seems to have just made an early start on the swarming.
Gog and Magog behind the gate was not a new story, not even new to this podcast, where I think it’s come up a few times. The only missing piece here is the usual addition that it was Alexander the Great who had raised those gates against this incursion from the lands beyond. It is interesting though to hear of it in ibn Fadlan’s account, in the mouth of a Bulghar ruler - who, some have suggested, may again have been trying here to intimidate his guest - and apparently passed to him in writing from “the Wisu,” a people who crop up in Arabic medieval geographies and whose exact identity is a little unclear.
One source has them 20 days away and another 3 months. One translator identifies them with the Finnic Vepsians, but there is some disagreement there, some question as to who these people actually were. From ibn Fadlan, we know them also as a destination for the merchants among the Bulghar, of whom there were many, who would go to the Turks for sheep and the Wisu for black sable and fox.
Ibn Fadlan travelled in the Bulghar lands and saw much that was more standard stuff than cosmic encounters or apocalyptic figures unleashed. He saw the way that ibn ‘Abdallah rode out unguarded among his people, alone, how when he passed, they removed their peaked caps and stood aside. He viewed those people as sickly and prone to early death. He saw, as alway interested him, their burial customs and was amazed at the way the women did not cry but the men did, how they “howl[ed] and weep[ed] in the ugliest and wildest way,” how they whipped at their own sides with leather. There were other customs too but only for the elite. “Ordinary folk [did] not do as much as [that] for their dead.”
Ibn Fadlan travelled with his hosts from that first place where they met. It was an encampment near three unfathomable lakes and a day’s journey from a market on the bank of the Volga River. There, goods from the Rus and Khazars arrived, and the Bulghar lord would have his portion, an enslaved person for every ten sent by the Rus or anyone else and a tenth of every Khazar cargo. But he also owed the Khazar kings a sable skin for every yurt in his realm and contended with the fact that his son was held hostage there. It may have been the case that ibn ‘Abdallah’s main goal in connection with the caliph had been cementing his rule in regards to internal rivals, but by ibn Fadlan’s estimation, and he was in a pretty good, though not infallible, position to know, it was absolutely fear of the Khazars that had caused ibn ‘Abdallah to send his petition in the first place.
This threat is always in the background of ibn Fadlan’s account, in minor mentions here or there of the Khazars, among the Ghuzziyya or from the Bulghars, but there’s not much detail to it really. In this case, there’s just the tale of a Khazar king who had once heard that his Bulghar counterpart had a most beautiful daughter and sent troops to take her, only for her to then die there at court. The king heard that there was a second beautiful daughter to be had, but her father had already taken steps to prevent it. He had married her off to a more friendly power, one subservient to him rather than the other way around.
There’s not much to the story. There’s the idea that the Bulghar ruler was unable to resist the Khazars, by will or force, only through something of a loophole, and there’s the concept of the hostage bride, not at all an uncommon one. And that’s about it, or at least that’s it in the version of ibn Fadlan I’m reading from, but there is more. There’s more in the work of a writer born in the late 12th century, a man named Yaqut ibn ‘Abdallah al-Rumi al-Hamawi who extensively quoted and occasionally disagreed with the work of earlier sources. The source he was quoting in this case was none other than our own ibn Fadlan.
So that’s strange, you might be thinking. He’s quoting a passage that isn’t really in the book. But then “books” are living, shifting things. They change, particularly in being copied by hand. It’s entirely possible that the manuscript of ibn Fadlan’s work that Yaqut was working from contained this passage on the Khazars, or maybe he made an error in attributing to one writer what he’d actually read from another. And this second possibility does seem to be the likely one, because that Khazars passage is one we know from a quite a different source, also from the 10th century: al-Istakhri’s Book of Highways and Kingdoms.
Whatever it’s source, whether in ibn Fadlan’s observations or only in al-Istakhri’s, the Khazars passage does at least provide a sense of the threat the Khazars still posed. “The Saqalibah and those who live on the Khazar border are under [its king’s] rule,” it says. “He addresses them as slaves and they owe him their obedience.” They owed more than that. They owed duties imposed, which could “take any form, including food and drink and other requirements.” Sable furs, for example, as we’ve seen in ibn Fadlan’s report. They also owed him women, the text tells us. “It is the custom of the king of the Khazars to possess twenty-five women, daughters of the neighbouring kings, taken either with their compliance or by force.” These women were each kept to a chamber with their own eunuch, as were sixty more enslaved concubines, waiting on the king to call on them. And there was, I hope, more to their lives than just this, perhaps access to power of their own, but that, the text can tell us nothing.
What it does tell us is of a powerful king whose rule is defined by very definitive numbers. His army is 12,000 strong, never less, for when a man dies another is immediately brought in. And his reign is 40 years, no more, for when he reaches that time, he is put to death. “His mind is defective,” his subjects will say, “and his judgement is impaired.” It’s an interesting idea, and I have tried to find other sources for it, but the ones I’ve seen refer back to either ibn Fadlan or al-Istakhri, those referencing the latter saying that it was not a set 40 years but something rather similar. It was said to be a number that a newly crowned king would be forced to choose immediately after having been strangled nearly to death with silk.
When the king did die, whether after 40 years or some other number they’d decided upon while struggling back to consciousness, then the burial site was within a building that had 20 chambers or tents inside it. None were to know which one the king was buried in. None were to be able to disturb him in death, “no devil, man, worm, or vermin,” and just to make sure of that, those who had conducted the burial were beheaded.
Of course an account credited to ibn Fadlan would include funeral practices.
One last note from this passage, to tie it all together for this maybe-ibn Fadlan/actually-al-Istakhri, and that is how it ends. “Some claim,” it reads, “that the Khazars are the tribes of Gog and Magog,” those same people the Bulghar’s giant belonged to.
As for ibn Fadlan, he would have more to see and more to do in this place far from home, far, though he was there to teach, from any place where things were done as he expected. Far from any money he might have handed over to his host.
He will soon be encountering the Rusiyyah, the warrior-merchants who traded on the shores of the Volga River, their identity itself open to question. He will, for he never seem to have missed such a thing when he could help it, witness a much-discussed funeral there on the shore. And as for us, we’ll follow along with him. We’ll finish the story of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, the person and also the text, the circumstances that have brought it down to us.
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.
Hansen, Valerie. The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World and Globalization Began. Simon and Schuster, 2020.
Korpela, Jukka Jari. Slaves from the North: Finns and Karelians in the East European Slave Trade, 900 - 1600. BRILL, 2018.
Mako, Gerald. The Islamization of the Volga Bulghars: A Question Reconsidered. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011.
Romano, John F. Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Vernadsky, George. Kievan Russia. Yale University Press, 1973.
Wilson, Joe. Black Banner and White Nights: The 10th-Century Travel Account of Ibn Fadlan. James Madison University, 2014.