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When last we spoke, Ahmad ibn Fadlan was busy making himself uncomfortable in the lands of Bulghar king. He was disturbed by the food, so often spoiled, so oily. He was distressed by what might be read as encounters with the supernatural: the remains of a slain giant for example, or the sight of armies of jinn struggling violently in the night sky. He was repeatedly alarmed by the things his host told him, quite possibly things that his host had told specifically to alarm and intimidate him.
The Bulghars were a sickly people, he declared, perhaps unfairly. They seemed ever, to him, unwell. But that would not be the case with everyone he met while away. That would not be the case of the people he referred to as Rusiyyah. But who were they? Who were these warrior merchants who traded along the Volga? These Vikings, as they’re broadly described. Who were they? Were they Swedish-influenced Slavs? Were they Swedish Vikings who had settled among the Slavs?
In addressing that question, James Montgomery helpfully runs us through some of the possibilities, that they were members of an eastern Swedish tribe, that they were a people from around the river Ros’ in the present day Ukraine, that they were, quote, “a group of Kievan chieftains on an expedition to extort tribute from the Slavs” that ibn Fadlan mistook for warrior merchants come to trade, that the text and its author cannot be trusted enough to make any such assessment, or that they were, quote, “a people in the process of ethnic, social and cultural adaptation and assimilation—the process whereby the Scandinavian Rus became the Slavic Rus, having been exposed to the influence of the Volga Bulghars and the Khazars.”
For what it’s worth, Montgomery’s own assessment is that the picture ibn Fadlan offers us is one of “a people in the process of ethnic, social and cultural adaptation, assimilation and absorption,” and he in turn quotes F. Donald Logan, whose words I’ll include here.
“The principal historical question is not whether the Rus were Scandinavians or Slavs, but, rather, how quickly these Scandinavian Rus became absorbed into Slavic life and culture. . . . In 839 the Rus were Swedes; in 1043 the Rus were Slavs. Some time between 839 and 1043 two changes took place: one was the absorption of the Swedish Rus into the Slavic people among whom they settled, and the second was the extension of the term ‘Rus’ to apply to these Slavic peoples by whom the Swedes were absorbed.”
By this reading, what ibn Fadlan shows us is a snapshot somewhere along that fluid process. And I should note here, that this is not the only reading. The history and origins of the Rus are subject to some disagreement, and you can search under the terms “Normanist dispute” if you are interested. But we’re not going to wade into that here.
What we are going to do is see the Rusiyyah through ibn Fadlan’s eyes, in their appearance, their hygiene, their trade in and reliance on slavery, and of course, at a funeral.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that is all about, as you might expect, journeys in that medieval world. This is the part of the podcast where I tell you about the podcast Patreon, and indeed I do have a Patreon announcement to make. I’ve decided to switch over to a pay-what-you-can approach. So whether $1 a month works best for you right now or $10, or something in between, you’ll be able to listen to early, ad-free episodes with extra content. There are multiple options, but all will give you access to the same stuff. If that’s an option for you and sounds like something you’d like to do, you can do so over at patreon.com/humancircus or by way of my website at humancircuspodcast.com.
On a related note, I also have some thank-yous to send out before we get going. Thank you very much, Richard. Thank you very much, Tobias. And thank you very much, Justine.
And now, let’s get back to the story, the last episode in our Ahmad ibn Fadlan story. We’re going to wrap up his travels and his text, and as I spoke about a moment ago, we’re getting into that story as he tells us about the Rusiyyah.
The Rusiyyah came from their boats to the trading settlement where ibn Fadlan found them, with “bread, meat, onions, milk, alcohol,” and more. They brought it all over to a large wooden block with the face of a man upon it and smaller figures set all around it. They prostrated themselves before the block and asked for intercession on behalf of their business there.
“Lord,” one might say, “I have come from a distant land, with [this] number of [enslaved women] and [that] of sable pelts.” He would list and itemize everything he had brought. Then, he would make his offerings from them and would say, “I want you to bless me with a rich merchant, one with many dinars and dirhams who will buy from me whatever I wish and not haggle over any price I set.”
The longer his wish went unfulfilled, the worse his business in trade there on the banks of the Volga, the more he would turn to those smaller figures for assistance, making offerings and prostrating himself before each one, the sons and daughters of their lord, ibn Fadlan says, other figures within their pantheon. But if business was good, he would sacrifice sheep or cows, giving away cuts of the meat as charity and leaving the rest round that central block of wood. By the next morning, it would all be eaten by dogs, and the man would give thanks, saying, “My lord is pleased with me and has eaten my offering.”
Whoever they were, these Vikings, these Rusiyyah, were at least in some ways very impressive to our guide. Where ibn Fadlan had viewed the Bulghars as sickly and weak, of the Rusiyyah he said he’d “never seen bodies as nearly perfect as [theirs],” “as tall as palm trees, fair and reddish.” They were clearly a sight to behold.
Every man among them wore a cloak that hung down over one of their shoulders. They carried axes, broad bladed swords, and daggers, always close at hand. Designs of trees and other images darkened their skin, either tattooed or painted on, from toes to neck. Every woman wore gold or silver neck rings, their number indicating their husband’s wealth. A small ornament, perhaps a disc, hung at their breast, “iron, silver, brass, or gold,” and attached to it, a ring and small knife.
I’ve read that what ibn Fadlan or some later scribe takes for a knife here is possibly either an elaborate cloak-pin or maybe instead an instrument for cleaning the ears, which does sound like a slightly odd implement to confuse with a small weapon. But If it was indeed for ear-cleaning, well that might have interested our traveller because as much as he was impressed by these people's physiques, their personal hygiene was quite a different matter.
They were, he said, “the filthiest of all God’s creatures,” no matter how perfect their bodies may have been. It was, for ibn Fadlan, the way there was no modesty to their sex or bowel movements, the way they gave no thought to washing their hands after eating or intercourse, the way their communal washing accomplished honestly the opposite of what one usually looks for in a cleansing experience, using, quote, “the filthiest and most polluted water you can imagine.” And there are details.
Every morning, an enslaved woman would carry in a basin and place it before one of the men. He would wash his face, his hair, and his hands. He would wet his comb and run it through his hair. All, so far, was going well, but then the whole process would take a turn. Then, he would blow his nose and spit into the water. He would be, quote, “prepared to do any filthy, impure act in the water.” And when he was done with, the enslaved woman would bring that water to the next man, and the next, and then on to his colleagues, each in turn further fouling the water, washing their hands and face, combing their hair, and passing it on, one after another adding to the liquids in the bowl, taking of the liquids in the bowl, and sending it on down the line to the others.
Ibn Fadlan’s description may imply a ritual element here, and one can see the sharing of fluids as promoting a sense of brotherhood and unity. One can see it. However one can also see how it would have made pretty uncomfortable viewing for a first-hand witness or as told to a visitor, if that was how it happened, for any visitor really but especially one coming from a culture of such fixed hygienic practices, the lens through which he viewed these behaviours, from the Oghuz to the Pechenegs, the Bulghars, and now the Rusiyyah, in one place finding it necessary to wash away from local eyes for fear of what they would think he was doing, and now encountering the notion of this communal bowl of cleanliness and being pretty appalled, and not unreasonably.
It can be hard to get a handle on these travellers, across the distance of time and language, and Montgomery, the translator I’m reading from, says much the same of ibn Fadlan in particular. He talks about how he’s experimented with different personalities for ibn Fadlan himself, how he first saw him, as many others have, “as a slightly prim and prissy Muslim jurist who is taken reluctantly on this expedition,” or perhaps a senior soldier, one well-versed in Islamic practice and protocol. Montgomery says he couldn’t quite form a clear picture of him but was impressed by someone who he saw as “so careful an observer and so basically non-judgmental.”
But how would such a man have reacted to these Rusiyyah, tall, strong, and unhygienic; these Vikings who came ashore from their ships to wooden dwellings in which they lived in tens or twenties, a raised wooden platform for every one; these people who traded, in the enslaved and in furs; these people who drank, who drank day and night and sometimes died mid-drink with cup in hand; who, and this is not quite the terms in which it is put in the source, raped the enslaved women who they brought along to sell.
What would ibn Fadlan have made of all of this? I’m tempted to say there’s a kind of disgusted fascination here with the Rusiyyah, but I have to take the translator’s word as to the basically non-judgmental tone, even with regards to these people, the, quote, “filthiest of all God’s creatures,” in our traveller’s eyes. Maybe he was documenting them with a detached curiosity, but there is one area where that curiosity seems anything but detached, where at least the fascination part seems undeniable. If there was one detail that ibn Fadlan would never fail to include, it was always going to be a funeral.
He deals with the treatment of the dead by the Ghuzziyyah, by the Bulghars, and here in the most detail of all, by the Rusiyyah. He devotes more detail to the episode of the Rusiyyah chieftain’s funeral than any other aspect of his entire time abroad, and he confirms his own interest. He mentions that, much like the Ghuzziyyah, the sick were set apart to live or die alone, particularly if they were of a lower social rank. The dead were burned, the enslaved dead left to be eaten by animals. But he was told that their leaders were set alight and that sometimes more was done for them. He was, he says, “very keen to verify this,” and he was in luck, for while he was there, he learned of the death of an important man. And we are in luck, because he wrote about it in detail, laying out the series of ritual ceremonies that ushered this important man on into the next world.
It went like this.
The dead man’s body had been placed in a roofed grave, but that was not a final resting place at all, only a temporary one while the proper preparations were carried out.
To that end, his garments were being made ready. A small boat was being constructed. His possessions were being gathered and divided into three parts: one to his household and one to his funeral garb, one for alcohol to be drunk on the day of his burning.
His enslaved had been gathered and the assembly asked, “Who will die with him?” There in the crowd of what I can only assume were people with their hands planted firmly down by their sides, though likely there were powerful cultural and religious motivations at play, one had answered that they would, the commitment immediately binding, for there was no chance to withdraw. This, ibn Fadlan says, was usually a woman, and indeed that was the case here. Over the coming days, she would be cared for, kept happy and drunk, her feet washed by the hands of two attendants who were likely also there to insure that she didn’t have a change of heart and disappear.
Ibn Fadlan was at the river to see it all on the day they dug the dead man up. The boat, once made ready, had been beached and propped up by wood. A couch had been set upon it, covered in cushions and quilts of Byzantine silk.
The Rusiyyah approached, speaking words that ibn Fadlan did not understand. And there, “gloomy and corpulent but neither young nor old,” - maybe simply a way to say middle-aged, maybe something more sinister - was the woman he referred to as the Angel of Death, which does of course sound quite, quite sinister.
Ibn Fadlan watched soil and wood removed from the grave and the corpse brought up, its skin blackened by the climate but not yet beginning to rot. The fruit, alcohol, and other items that had been buried with him were also removed.
The body was dressed in fresh clothes, from its boots up to a gold buttoned caftan and a silk hat fringed with sable. It was carried up onto the boat and into the yurt that had been installed there, rested on a quilt, and propped up against cushions. He was made comfortable.
Fruit, herbs, and alcohol were placed next to him, meat, bread, and onions before him, weapons around him. A dog was cut in half and tossed aboard. Two horses ran until soaked with sweat and then cut to pieces and also thrown on. Two cows followed them, and then two chickens.
While this was being done, the enslaved woman had gone to from yurt to yurt, at each having sex with the man within, each saying after, “Tell your master that I have done this out of love for you,” though I wonder if there’s some confusion here, and the “you” is actually the master.
Next, she was brought to a structure that had been built like the frame of a door, a portal to the world beyond I suppose. She stood on the hands of the men and was raised up before it, three times uttering words before being lowered back down. Ibn Fadlan, turning to an interpreter and asking what had been said, heard “Look, I see my father and mother,” then “Look, I see all my dead kindred, seated,” and finally, “Look, I see my master, seated in the Garden. The Garden is beautiful and dark-green. He is with his men and his retainers. He summons me. Go to him.”
She handed her bracelets to the Angel of Death, her anklets to the two women who had served her in those last days. She cut off the head of a chicken, and it was thrown aboard to join the other animals. Then, she too went aboard, though not yet into the yurt where the body lay.
She was given a cup, which she chanted over, a farewell to her female companions ibn Fadlan was told, and then she drank. She was, by this point, visibly confused, drunk and quite possibly drugged, and though she made to enter the yurt, she could not, her head needing to be guided through the entrance by the Angel of Death.
There’s more ritual sex inside the yurt, rape we might say given that this is an enslaved woman who had not been able to make it through the doorway on her own. She had supposedly volunteered for this, but it’s not clear exactly how free that choice was. Maybe it was free, maybe not. Maybe the whole performance of free choice was only that, and it had been made for her, not by her.
At this point, the men outside the boat start to bang their shields with sticks, creating a great sound to cover up any coming from within, maybe to maintain the mystery, a sense of separation. To cover the sound of any screams, ibn Fadlan said, so that they wouldn’t discourage others from making that choice. Next would be the killing. And it doesn’t sound quick or clean. It sounds like a quite horrifying human sacrifice.
The woman was held by hands and legs. The Angel of Death wrapped a rope around her neck, and while it was pulled in two directions, she stabbed her with a broad-bladed dagger, “here and there” ibn Fadlan says, between the ribs, until she died.
The ceremony was nearing an end now, as the closest male relative of the dead man stepped forward. He was naked, a lit piece of wood in hand, and he faced the people, backing towards the boat, no one alive now left aboard. He set fire to the four structures that held it up, and then others came forward with burning branches that they added, the whole thing quickly catching.
Where ibn Fadlan watched, there was one of the Rusiyyah standing next to him, and the stranger spoke to his interpreter. What had he said, ibn Fadland wondered, and he was told.
“You Arabs,” he heard, “are a lot of fools! You purposefully take those closest to you, those you hold in the highest esteem, and you put them in the ground, where they are eaten by vermin and worms. We, on the other hand, cremate them there and then, so that they enter the Garden immediately.”
A fierce wind picked up then, and in scarcely an hour, all of it, the wood, the bodies, was fine ash. The Rusiyyah built up a mound over the remains, and “They wrote the man’s name and the name of the king of the Rusiyyah on it. Then they left.”
Ibn Fadlan had been very enthusiastic to witness the ceremonies of death, hard to say how enthusiastic he would have felt having done so.
However he felt, we’ll leave things for the moment. I’ll be back to wrap things up for Ahmad ibn Fadlan after this short break, and a word from the excellent fellow-history podcast, History of the Second World War.
…
In these stories, I sometimes examine the idea of whether or not a diplomatic mission has been successful, whether it has achieved its goals. In this case, that’s a little hard to do. This isn’t like the Brancacci mission where we had documentation of what the Venetian representatives were looking for from their efforts. We know what the Bulghars wanted, but what did the caliph in Baghdad need from the Bulghar leader? Did he get it? Did he perhaps not have a great deal invested in the whole project and not need much of anything at all? I’m not so sure.
Yes, the two parties were unequal, and the lands of the Bulghars might be seen as something of a backwater, but there was no small amount of silver that ran through those lands, enough silver, furs, and enslaved to matter. There was the benefit of adding security to the north of the caliphate’s borders, and of perhaps also redirecting resources away from the Samanids in Iran and further east.
For what it’s worth, the Bulghars would not be abandoning Islam for lack of anticipated funding. They would retain their religion, right through until the Mongol invasions of the early 13th-century rolled over them and they disappeared into what is often termed the Golden Horde of Batu Khan.
Naturally, none of this is apparent in ibn Fadlan’s work, and fair enough. He can’t be held responsible for not telling us about happened in the hundreds of years that followed his adventure, but then he also doesn’t account for his departure from the Bulghar ruler now known as ibn ‘Abdallah, does not say on what terms they parted, and doesn’t tell us of his return journey, at least not in the version of his report that has survived for us to read. It’s possible that there’s more out there somewhere, and maybe it will even resurface at some point. But until then, we do have another source to turn to.
We have a geographer born in the 13th century writing that the caliph Muqtadir had sent someone among the Bulghars to instruct them. That much we know. But then he also records a return journey, not the return journey by ibn Fadlan I mean, but a return journey by a group of Bulghars who are said to have retraced the course we have been following and come to Baghdad with the intention of then making the pilgrimage to Mecca. From that at least it sounds like the relationship was alive and well after ibn Fadlan left.
And it should be noted that this embassy was built for success. This is something that might not have come across when considering the unfortunate money issues, how vulnerable the financing of the venture was to the selfish interventions of interested parties, or how those instructors who had departed Baghdad but quickly turned back without ever reaching their destination. It becomes clear though when you look at those who were selected to go.
The party was not made up of men from the palaces of Baghdad, doomed to grope blindly through a series of bewildering circumstances and societies. There was one who had been enslaved among the Rus, a Turk, a Slav, and ibn ‘Abdallah’s own envoy, who travelled with them from Baghdad. It was a diverse and experienced set of individuals, one resilient enough to negotiate the challenges that were to come.
But what of ibn Fadlan himself? What of our traveller and his story? As to the former, it is of course hard to say. We don’t know exactly how smoothly his travels went after he left us and after he left the Bulghars, following his spring and summer among them. Yaqut, the same Yaqut whose text included segments of ibn Fadlan’s travels, claims that the version of ibn Fadlan’s report that he worked from included passages on his journey home to that city, but those are passages which he unfortunately did not include in his own text. Some have since thought that ibn Fadlan didn’t go all the way back to Baghdad at all, that instead he may have settled in somewhere like Bukhara.
And that’s maybe where his story, his report, settled too, perhaps read there by those with an interest in travelling north, merchants who might want to know what peoples and customs to expect. What was worn, what was done, and how the locals responded to Muslims and their practices. It was a useful report, only rarely dipping into the fantastical, the marvelous, and when it did, why did it?
There’s the possibility, of course, that ibn Fadlan himself was unreliable, but that largely doesn’t seem to have been the case. There’s the possibility that his interpreter/interpreters were unreliable. They are not foregrounded in this text the way translation sometimes is in travel narratives, but they are the invisible leading actors in this account. Then there’s Montgomery’s own theory, one that I have a lot time for, that, quote, “the psychological pressure of being so far away from home, so far north, at the mercy of the Bulghar king, in danger of losing his life, hijacks the narrative, forcing Ibn Faḍlān to be much more receptive to the wondrous and the miraculous and the strange.”
It’s helpful to remember that those psychological pressures may well have been quite consciously applied by his hosts, that they may well have toyed with him at times and sought to make him uncomfortable. I also think it’s useful to be reminded of those pressures, to remember that this person, removed from us by a full millennium as he may be, was indeed a person, susceptible to the stress, fear, and uncertainty that were involved in this series of encounters with the different and strange and incomprehensible, with peoples among whom he may well at times have felt unable to be himself or safely carry on his personal routines and rituals. That he likely felt some relief upon completing his time abroad and coming back to more familiar surroundings.
In the year 1219, very nearly 300 years after Ahmad ibn Fadlan had made his journey, Yaqut ibn 'Abdallah made his, likely finding ibn Fadlan’s writings in the process. He writes of having seen several copies of those writings, but that doesn’t seem to have been in Baghdad. They circulated, but not necessarily at the centre of the caliphate.
Yaqut may have come across them on his 1219 trip to Merv, where he was given access to two large libraries, or maybe it was the following year, in Jurjaniyyah, that he found them, in the place he’d soon have to flee before word of impending Mongol invasion, eventually taking refuge in Aleppo.
For a long time, the passages of ibn Fadlan in Yaqut’s work were the only ibn Fadlan we had, or at least, the only ones we knew we had. It was a long time before the quote/unquote discovery of the manuscript that is the basis for the story I’m telling, clearly much fuller than Yaqut’s material but still not quite complete, cutting off amid a passage on the Khazars and including no mention of the return. And I say quote/unquote before discovery because it wasn’t exactly found in a snare-ridden temple atop a mysterious mountain. It was found in a library in Mashhad, Iran.
That caveat aside, credit where it’s due to Zeki Velidi Togan’in, the soldier, scholar, leader, politician, revolutionary, and historian who made the discovery. He was an individual who lived a full and fascinating life, very full if you want to go have a look at that, and in 1923, 1,000 years after our traveller’s journey, he found ibn Fadlan’s account in a 13th century collection of Arabic geographies. In 1939, he completed his translation of the account into German, but it would not be the first translation based on the manuscript he had found and had since worked with. That would be accomplished by Soviet scholar Andrei Kovaleskii, or at least, largely accomplished. Kovaleskii had been arrested in 38, just short of completing his translation into Russian, and sentenced to five years of hard labour. The Russian edition that featured his work would be published without a translator on its cover, only an editor, a nod, for those who knew, to the labour of a man who could not now be openly acknowledged.
For readers of English, they would have to wait until the 1979 work of James E. McKeithen. Pretty recently, really, and indicative of the way we can be looking at something a thousand years old and still have new sources, resources, and developments emerge that alter foundationally our ability to do so, in this case our, or at least my, ability to read an early 10th century report outside of a 13th century geographer’s quotations.
We’re going to leave Ahmad ibn Fadlan here, whether “here” really was somewhere like Bukhara or whether it was back in Baghdad. I hope you’ve enjoyed this series.
If you are listening to this episode on the Patreon feed, and just a reminder that you can do so for as little as $1 a month, then please keep listening. If not, I’ll be back soon, with more stories of medieval travellers, 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.
Frye, R.N. and Blake, R.P. "Notes on the Risala of Ibn Fadlan," in The Turks in the Early Islamic World, edited by C. Edmund Bosworth. Routledge, 2017.
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.
Kratchkovsky, I.Y. Among Arabic Manuscripts: Memories of Libraries and Men. BRILL, 2016.
Mako, Gerald. The Islamization of the Volga Bulghars: A Question Reconsidered. Harrassowitz Verlag, 2011.
Montgomery, James E. "Ibn Fadlan’s ‘Mission to the Volga’: An Extraordinary Narrative by a Not-so-extraordinary Writer," an interview with ArabLit.
Peacock, A.C.S. The Great Seljuk Empire. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
Romano, John F. Medieval Travel and Travelers: A Reader. University of Toronto Press, 2020.
Vernadsky, George. Kievan Russia. Yale University Press, 1973.
Wladyslaw, Duczko. Viking Rus: Studies on the Presence of Scandinavians in Eastern Europe. BRILL, 2004.
Wilson, Joe. Black Banner and White Nights: The 10th-Century Travel Account of Ibn Fadlan. James Madison University, 2014.