Calicut (Kozhikode) as depicted in the 1575 La Cosmographie Universelle de Tout le Monde
YOU CAN LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE HERE OR ON YOUR FAVOURITE PODCATCHER.
Not all voyages reach their destination.
Some sink below the surface, either figuratively or literally, and never reach their goal. Travellers are lost in the desert and become bones for those who come after to comment on. They board the ship that never shows up in port, or they’re cut down by bandits in the mountains. They freeze and are forgotten.
For others, it’s more that their intended destination itself doesn’t quite reach the fullest extent of their story. A promise is not kept maybe, or their expectations are not met, and instead of returning and perhaps leaving us no kind of a story at all, they carry on.
This is that kind of a story.
Its protagonist appears not to have wanted to be the main character, and that goes beyond the kind of “your humble chronicler” or ”I, who am not worthy” posturing that can appear in this kind of thing. There’s a deeper antipathy to travel. He actually expresses a desire to do away with it entirely at one point. He bemoans his fate at being so far from home and mutters darkly of certain enemies who’d arranged for him to be selected for the journey. And he does not go where he’d initially planned, or rather he does not stop there.
He does not like his intended destination, does not find it suits him and does not find the diplomatic gains to be forthcoming, but then, a vision and an invitation unlooked for send his embassy in a new direction, take him to an even more unfamiliar location.
The possibilities open up for our traveller, and we - the “this podcast” we - journey somewhere that we haven’t really spent time yet. It’s the mid-15th century, and we are headed for the interior of India.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers. And the podcast has a Patreon, one with early, ad-free, and extra listening on a what works for you basis, for $1 a month, or 3, or 5. Whatever works for you, it’s really all incredibly helpful. And on that note, I want to send out a thank you to the newest Patreon supporter of the podcast, Tom. Thank you very much!
And now, back to the story.
It’s the story of a deeply unenthused ambassador who’d set out for one destination, come away unimpressed, and would be whisked off to quite another, there to witness great things - great beauty, great violence - but ultimately to come away with his position there, perhaps even his very identity, in some doubt.
Today, we’re jumping on from the Clavijo/Timur storyline that we followed during the last series, and if you haven’t listened to that yet, it’s not strictly necessary to have done so before getting into this one, though there are connections. Today, it’s a diplomatic trip from the Timurid centre of power, but that would not be from Timur’s Samarkand. Not from Samarkand at all, but from Herat, from Shah Rukh’s Herat. You might remember from that last series that Clavijo received an invitation to visit Shah Rukh there when he was still on his way to Timur.
Shah Rukh was Timur’s son, the one who had managed, after Timur’s death and some very unsteady years, to seize control of a substantial portion of his late father’s empire, and despite the violent instability that had led into his reign, to successfully hold onto it for some four decades. Our story is set quite late in those decades.
Our story today comes to us as a section within a book of much broader scope, called The Rising of the Auspicious Twin Stars, and the Confluence of the Oceans, a history of the Timurid family. That section which concerns us, takes us to events late in Shah Rukh’s reign, to the year 1242, and to its author setting out for India. That author’s name was Abd-al-Razzāq Samarqandi.
Abd-al-Razzaq had been born late in 1413, too late to have been around for the rule of Timur himself, and by the time of his departure, was in his late twenties. He’d been born in Herat, the son of an important man, a qadi or judge. As these things do tend to go, he also would be an important man.
He was leaving for the city of spices, Qāliqūṭ or Kozhikode, on the Malabar Coast of the Indian state of Kerala, a point of access to the pepper growing lands of the interior and a key port for long distance maritime trade at which Muslim merchants found particular success. In the previous century, it had been described by ibn Battuta as one of the world’s greatest ports, visited by merchants from as far away as Arabia in one direction and China in the other, with 13 large Chinese junks in port when he was there, had been described by Chinese traveller Wang Dayuan as the most important port for “all the foreigners in the Western Ocean.”
That was where Abd-al-Razzaq was going, sent there because of an invitation and because of an earlier diplomatic mission. By his own account, Shah Rukh’s representatives had been visiting the Sultanate of Bengal, and on their return trip, had stopped in at Qāliqūṭ where they’d met with its ruler. The Samoothiri, for so he was known, had been impressed with their glowing description of Shah Rukh and his power, impressed enough to send envoys of his own to the Timurid ruler.
The Muslim ambassador who then visited Shah Rukh in Herat told him that the Friday sermon in Qāliqūṭ, the khutba, could, if he wished, be recited in his name. He told him that the Samoothiri might even be convinced to convert to Islam himself. It was in response to this invitation, this promise, that Shah Rukh dispatched Abd-al-Razzaq with gifts of horses, robes, cloaks, and headwear, and Abd-al-Razzaq was not exactly pleased with his selection. He was not happy at the opportunity or honoured to be chosen. He complained in writing that his enemies had arranged it, rubbing their hands at the thought of his being lost at sea on such a long voyage.
But no matter how displeased he may have been, Abd-al-Razzaq departed on the 13th of January, 1442. There were ruined buildings in the desert as they travelled, a city of which the wall and four bazaars could still be distinguished, though there was no sign of people that might use it. They were headed first for Hormuz.
Hormuz could be found at the Strait of Hormuz, where the Persian Gulf met that of Oman, still can be. Our traveller reported that it brought merchants from Egypt, Syria, Arabia, and Anatolia, from Iran, Khorasan, and Turkestan, from the ports of China, India, and Java, and on all the product that flowed from these far flung locations, all of that which, quote, “the sun, the moon, and the rains have combined to bring to perfection,” save for silver and gold, a tenth of the value was paid. It was much easier, if you were lucky enough to be lord of such a place, to let the goods of the world come past your doorstep and take a little off the top on the way, than it was to go out there and get them.
To this end, the city was well maintained and no injustice allowed, regardless of one’s religion. I mean, I’m sure there was indeed at least some injustice, but still the city was known as dar al-aman, the abode of peace, and in Hormuz, Abd-al Razzaq found a friendly welcome, a house for his needs, and everything he could ask for, but however welcome he felt when he first arrived, Abd-al Razzaq would soon find reason to lose that happy glow.
And by “soon,” I mean over the two months that followed, as the city’s governors found one reason after another to keep him there, allowing the period when it was best to travel, in the early or middle period of the monsoon season, to pass, and only letting him go on when that season was reaching its end and the risk of piracy was at its worst.
It’s not clear from the text exactly why he was restrained there in the city so long. Maybe it actually was his fault, and he was here playing the grumbling out of towner, confused and annoyed by the unfamiliar boxes he was being called upon to tick. Maybe it wasn’t.
When you see his first reaction to taking to sea, you start to wonder if it wasn’t a case of self-sabotage on his part, if he hadn’t maybe been dragging his feet and hadn’t actually been all that keen to go to sea at all.
He wrote that “the events, the perils, which accompany a voyage by sea…, present the most marked indication of the Divine omnipotence, the grandest evidence of a wisdom which is sublime. … that the execution of so important an undertaking cannot be either accomplished or related, but by the help of that living and powerful Being, who makes easy that which is most difficult.”
It does not appear that God chose to make it easy for our traveller. Indeed, there seems more in his experience that is horror at the irresistible power of the elements than there is appreciation for sublime wisdom.
When the smell of the ship first hit his nostrils, he wrote that quote, “all the terrors of the sea presented themselves before me, I fell into so deep a swoon, that for three days respiration alone indicated that life remained within me.” For what it’s worth, he was not alone in this panic.
By the time he struggled back to consciousness with the ship then underway, many of the merchants aboard were in an uproar, crying out “that the time for navigation was passed, and that every one who put to sea at this [time] was alone responsible for his death, since he voluntarily placed himself in peril.” Many took the financial loss of having already paid for their passage and disembarked at Muscat. They weren’t even clear of the Gulf of Oman, but they were at least alive while some who had left Hormuz on a separate ship might not have been, for our traveller would later try and fail to find out what had become of them. And another ship, whose passengers he’d catch up with later in Qāliqūṭ, would be plundered at sea by pirates, those aboard lucky to escape with their lives.
As for Abd-al Razzaq, he survived. He and the rest of his embassy made it a little further down the coast of Oman but not so very far, just to Quriyat, where the mood was grim. It seems not to have been uncommon for merchants who worked the waters of this coast to be forced by adverse weather to abandon their plans. There was even a word for such a failed voyage. Abd-al Razzaq, however, writes in very dramatic tones of how it affected him.
“In consequence of the severity of pitiless weather and the adverse manifestations of a treacherous fate, my heart was crushed like glass and my soul became weary of life, and my season of relaxation became excessively trying for me.
At the moment when, through the effect of so many vicissitudes, the mirror of my understanding had become covered with rust, and the hurricane of so many painful circumstances had extinguished the lamp of my mind, so that I might say ... I had fallen into a condition of apathetic stupidity.”
Adding to the ambassador’s misery was a mention of home that made it all that much worse.
One evening, he met a merchant who had recently arrived from India. And where was he going? Abd-al-Razzaq asked him.
“My only object,” the man replied, “is to reach the city of Herat.”
The name of his home city was like the striking open of an already leaking wound. It threw Abd-al-Razzaq into distraction, and it brought to mind a poem.
“When I begin to weep at the time of the travellers’ evening prayer,
I relate my tale with the cries and wails of the stranger.
Recalling friend and home, I cry so hard,
that I would root out the custom of travel from the world.
I am from the land of the beloved, not of the rival.
O guards, take me back to the companionship of my friends.”
It’s quite a moving reminder I think, that these travellers were not on vacation. They did not necessarily choose this; he certainly didn’t. There could be no easy communications home. They had in effect been banished, some for years, with no idea if they would return or who among their friends or family would still be there alive if they did. You can see why someone like Abd-al-Razzaq might consider himself to be cursed by such a burden, why he’d weep through the travellers’ evening prayer. The way ahead would offer little by way of immediate relief.
It was May, but the heat put him in mind of the fires of hell, hot enough “that it burned the ruby in the mine and the marrow in the bones; the sword in its scabbard melted like wax, and the gems which adorned the handle of the [dagger] were reduced to coal.” There’s some lines of poetry at this point about roasted gazelles in the desert, and how the fish in their ponds burnt like silk in the flame, and both water and air were hot enough that the fish sought relief in the fire itself.
Clearly there was some exaggeration at work here, but equally clearly, the heat was starting to tell, and Abd-al-Razzaq and the other members of the embassy were sick, feverish, fatigued, and weakened over a span of four months. The embassy heard word of a place nearby with a more salubrious climate and cooling waters and arranged to be taken there, but the sickness was, in Abd-al-Razzaq’s depiction, horrible. He was feeble, powerless to utter a word during the day, and then eyes wide open all night, “soul on the point of quitting the asylum of [his] body.”
For one member of the party, it went past that point.
Of his own elder brother, Abd-al-Razzaq said that he obeyed that maxim that “Man knows not in what country he must die,” and the other, that “Wherever you may be, death shall reach you.”
He thought then the words of a pre-Islamic Arabic poet, that “eventually, one is abandoned by one’s brother, by the life of one’s father, [by all] except the twin star Farqadan.”
Worn down by grief and sickness, describing himself as detached from life, Abd-al-Razzaq was carried aboard a ship bound for India to try again to reach his destination. And with that, we will take a quick break.
...
Abd-al-Razzaq’s second try at the crossing went better than the first. Maybe it helped that he felt plucked from the brink of death by the soothing ocean air. I’m sure it helped that a favourable breeze pushed them forward, that no pirates troubled their voyage, that after all their previous difficulties, their waiting and sickness in the heat of Oman, this time, they reached their destination in 18 days. They were in Qāliqūṭ.
In the text, this comes as something of a surprise in its suddenness. These things are never exactly paced like novels. But after the nearness of death and despair just sentences before, after the talk of merchants opting not to follow through on a passage they had already paid for, they arrived.
In one edition, this lurch in circumstances is actually worsened by a somewhat cavalier note from the translator that he ought to have included a lengthy description of the vessel but hadn’t. Elsewhere, you can read Abd-al-Razzaq’s comparisons of the ship, borrowed from another poet. It is a girl “whose language is soft and sweet,” “an overawing cloud like a sea-bird in flight,” its “mast firm and stable as the Pole star.”
On this ship they had arrived, at Qāliqūṭ, a thriving port in the southwest of India frequented by an ocean of travellers. Abd-al-Razzaq describes it as “a perfectly secure harbour,” and its success, the sheer level of activity seemed to bear this out. But as Sebastian Prange points out in Monsoon Islam, it actually lacked a natural harbour and lighterage was needed, the transfer of goods by barge. Ibn Battuta’s own possessions had been lost when the ship bringing them in had been smashed on the shore. Despite such possibilities, the port rose from obscurity to renown, a rise that has often been credited to the traffic of Muslim traders.
But quoting Krishna Iyer, “The rapid rise of Qāliqūṭ was due not so much to its geographical advantages, nor even to the coming of the [Muslims] and the Chinese, as to the policy of the [rulers], which induced them to flock to this port in such large numbers.” As Prange continues, “The key to Qāliqūṭ’s success can be found in policies by which its rulers sought to address a basic problem facing maritime merchants: trust.”
To a greedy ruler, or perhaps just a very immediately needy ruler, the wealth of merchants passing through their port could be a real temptation, cargo and coin there to be had, within their control, their grasp, if only they were to just to take it, and there were stories of those who did, avaricious princes and the like who made this or that port one to be avoided, if you could help it, but not Qāliqūṭ. Qāliqūṭ was a place you could depend on. You could trust that you were going to leave with your possessions intact and that, as a Muslim, you were going to be able to do business without being troubled for your religion. And you find both these elements of trust talked about in the sources. They’re mentioned in this one, with the acknowledgement that no matter what your vessel or who you were, you would get the same treatment. Duties were low, lower than Hormuz, and only applied to sales, not simply goods passing through the port. Moreover, goods were not stolen, neither by thieves on the street nor by the port authorities themselves. You could depend on that, and that was worth a great deal.
So that was where Abd-al-Razzaq was, with the rest of the Timurid embassy in that most dependable of towns, a kind of merchants’ paradise but not in all ways ideal for him. He’d never wanted to be part of this embassy, had lost his brother and suffered sickness. He was clearly thrown out of balance by this moment, this place, into which he had been flung. There were many Muslims there in Qāliqūṭ, but this city, unlike Hormuz, was not within the sphere of Islam. Maybe that informed his reaction.
Abd-al-Razzaq starts into the city with a little verse on its strangeness, on “Extraordinary beings, who are neither men nor devils,” not the ideal way to refer to local inhabitants of a city you’re visiting. He describes the people he saw, dressed only between the knee and naval, and contrasts them with the city’s Muslims, resplendent in clothes more to his liking and “manifest[ing] luxury in every particular.”
Our author made some passing observations as to the caste system, noting the existence of difference within it but seeing all as practising polytheism and idolatry. He saw the ships leaving, their cargo mostly pepper. He said that you could have anything you wanted in that port save for cow meat.
Overall, despite his acknowledgement of the city’s good situation where it came to maritime trade, the ambassador does not seem to have been impressed. He did not enjoy his time there. And part of that disappointment may have been caused by his audience with the Samoothiri. It was not that he was kept waiting; it appears he had only to linger three days in admittedly comfortable lodgings before being brought in. However, when he got there, Abd-al-Razzāq saw a man among the few thousand in the hall who seemed to him naked as other men he’d seen there, or near enough, and just as Abd-al-Razzāq was distinctly underwhelmed by this ruler, the ruler seems to have thought very little of him. The gifts Abd-al-Razzaq had brought were paraded before the throne, but the Samoothiri seemed to have little regard either for them or the man who had brought them.
All that talk of prayer in Shah Rukh’s name or even possibly conversion seemed now very far away. Maybe they’d never really been on the table. Maybe the gifts themselves failed to live up to expectations and did not exactly speak to the Samoothiri of a great and powerful lord in distant Herat. Maybe the circumstances had since changed. With neither party particularly moved by what they’d seen, the audience ended, and Abd-al-Razzāq returned to his lodgings.
And that’s pretty much what we see of his interactions with the Samoothiri. We don’t get a series of follow-up visits that build until the two really get to know each other and come to earn one another’s respect. Instead, we get Abd-al-Razzāq’s complaints.
It was like that period in the heat of Quriyat again, except that he wasn’t sick. He was just stricken, stuck there, and hating it. From early November 1442 until mid-April 1443, he waited, quote, “in this disagreeable place, where everything became a source of trouble and weariness.” And it’s hard to say exactly how to read this. Was he that insufferable friend of yours from another city who endlessly bemoans the better food and culture offered there? Was it that the people were strange to him, and he was not adapting well? Was it not, for all its laudable dependability where merchant ships were concerned, not a very nice place to be? Was he simply ill-suited to travel and besides that still suffering from grief?
It was during one particularly dark night, when the vision of better things appeared to him. It came in the form of Shah Rukh, the man who had sent him here. “Afflict yourself no longer,” the Timurid ruler told him, touching his face. Remembering the dream during morning prayer, he felt hope for the future, and indeed, his circumstances were about to change.
He was not about to be summoned home to Herat. He was not rescued in quite that way. He was going even further from home. Even as he investigated the possible meaning of his dream, consulting wise people in the city as to what it might portend, a messenger was arriving with the request that the Samoothiri send along this Timurid representative who wasted away there in Qāliqūṭ. There was someone who wanted to see him. There was an emperor who wanted to see him, the Emperor of Vijayanagara.
It’s possible that Abd-al-Razzāq may not even have known of Vijayanagara before, of the capital city for which the empire is named or its ruler. But he appears excited to be going there.
He writes of how this emperor ruled over lands that would take three months to cross, over 300 ports the equal of Qāliqūṭ, of how the ruler of Qāliqūṭ was not subject to his laws but did stand in awe of him. Abd-al-Razzāq was moving up, and if he didn’t know much about his destination just yet, he seems to have been energized by the possibilities. Maybe this would live up to his expectations and dispel a little of his general gloom about the entire endeavour.
The first step was an audience of dismissal with the Samoothiri, an audience about which he had nothing to say; he’d really already checked out. After that, it was back to sea, but not so far this time, just north up the Malabar Coast to Mangalore. Just a few days there, and then leaving the coast, heading for the interior, almost immediately finding something truly striking.
It was a temple, square, bronze, and unequalled, with a great golden figure standing before it, eyes set with rubies, a work of “wonderful delicacy and perfection.” And then, having crossed the Western Ghats mountain range, he reached the town of Belur, its houses like palaces, its women like those of paradise, and one of its temples indescribable, without being accused of exaggeration. It was tall enough that you could see it at a great distance. Its surrounding gardens, when you reached them, mirrors of the heavens in their polished stonework set among lush trees and flowers. Among them, the temple itself, in dark blue stone covered in designs leaving not a handbreadth bare.
“What can I say of that dome,
delicate as a copy of Paradise brought to the world?
The curve of its high arch like a new moon,
so tall it rubbed up against the celestial sphere.”
With these temples, Abd-al-Razzāq stressed the wondrous nature of their construction and the beauty of their art, but he had of course not forgotten that these were not temples to his god. They were places where, quote, “morning and evening, after devotional exercises, which [had] nothing in them to be agreeable to [his] God, they play[ed] on musical instruments, perform[ed] concerts, and [gave] feasts.” The Belur temple was, he said in quite an astonishing comparison, like a ka’bah for these idolaters.
Abd-al-Razzāq was two or three days in Belur before leaving, heading north. By the end of April, he would be in the city of Vijayanagara, and that’s where we will join him, next episode. We’ll talk about that place, that empire, and what happened while he was there.
Sources:
India in the Fifteenth Century: Being a Collection of Narratives of Voyages to India. Edited by Richard Henry Major. Hakluyt Society, 1857.
Alam, Muzaffar and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay. Indo-Persian Travels in the Age of Discoveries, 1400–1800. Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Prange, Sebastian R. Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast. Cambridge University Press, 2018.