Detail from Piri Ries’ 16th-century map of Cairo - (Wikimedia)
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In around the year 1025, a man named Joseph wrote from Palermo, Sicily, to an acquaintance back in Egypt. He wrote with concern for his wife and small boy there, and with anxiety over what they might do next.
His life had, of late, been difficult. He’d been shipwrecked off the coast of Libya and, quote, “came out of it without a dinar or even a dirhem and no garment to wear; [he] arrived naked in Tripoli,” perhaps quite literally so, perhaps more in a “but for the clothes on my back” sense of the word.
His luck seemed to have turned for the better when he encountered a man who owed him a measure of wax and agreed to give him 5 dinars for it, enough to see him provisioned and re-clothed, but then when he reached Palermo, there was more bad news to pass on. His small house had been torn down in his absence and another built in its place. No amount of arguing would see the matter settled in his favour, especially not without funds for a lawsuit. He wished he could locate his brother who owed him money, but of course he could not. That was how things had been with him.
To his colleague in Egypt, he wrote that he had previously sent him ten pounds of silk, and 6 ¼ dinars. He reminded him that he had left promissory notes of various values in his keeping, 2 dinars more in cash, and 1 with his wife. He reminded him that his wife would be due 10 dinars for the second installment of her marriage portion, and this brings us to the primary concern of his letter.
That “second installment” was the payment due to his wife on separation or in the unfortunate event of his death, and while that latter threat had only recently been very real, the former was now an immediate possibility. As was sometimes done by people in his position, he had left a bill of divorce with his wife, for he could not know what might befall him out there in the world, without any witness to say what had happened to him. He feared, as he put it, “the vicissitudes of fate,” but having left that bill in her possession he could at least be certain that, should he not be able to make his way back to his wife and child, she would be able to divorce and then marry again. Now he wondered if she might want to make use of that.
“[I do not know] whether I shall be able to return to them in the course of two or even three years,” he wrote, “for this town is menaced by enemy attack, and, at present, I do not have a thing.”
He gave instructions that his wife should be asked if she desired divorce, and if she did, then arrangements should be made and the proceeds of those promissory notes used to support their boy. If she didn’t, then she should be asked if she would come join him in Sicily, a drastic step, Goitein points out, to move away from the family of her birth and the protection it offered. But if she would do so, then Joseph would sell his home there and bring her and their boy to him in Palermo. It was, as he had written, under threat, from the Byzantines as it happened, but he apparently did not expect that to last.
Joseph sent this letter and then waited, leaving a great deal for his colleague in Egypt to handle on his behalf. He waited, and he hoped. “By God,” he wrote, “I did not write her that bill of divorce because I do not love her, but because I was afraid of the punishment of the Creator.” He must have waited a painfully long time for a reply, given what was at stake, and I know it’s unsatisfying, but I don’t know what that reply was.
His story, and that of his wife and boy, illustrates the disconnections, the fractures and risks involved in travel of the sort we’re often looking at in this podcast, with merchants going abroad in search of a way to make their living.
Today, we’ll focus on those risks, the responses to them, the written expressions of their consequences, and, if Joseph was something of a model character in seeing to the needs and wants of his family when he was kept away, we’ll hear of a case of a man who decidedly was not.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that treks, sails, and rides through medieval history in the wake of its travellers, and I should of course take this opportunity to remind you that this is a podcast with a Patreon, a much appreciated source of support for the podcast, and for myself, where patrons hear early, extra, and ad-free podcast listening, and I want to thank everyone who is already doing so. Thank you all very much.
And now, back to the story.
Today, I thought I’d talk about long distance relationships, because I assume that’s exactly the sort of thing you’re wanting to hear about from a history podcast like my own, because I am always aiming to provide you with some sort of medieval advice column, or really more that this was an unavoidable element of life, and an easy one to forget about in reading and hearing of merchants and others making their way about the world.
Today, we’ll take a look at what that was like for the people of the past, people like Joseph, whose difficulties on the Mediterranean you just heard about, and people on the other end of that home and away relationship.
We go first to the year 1204, or thereabouts. Our letter’s author has long been away from home, a necessary consequence for a merchant trading abroad in India, having journeyed by river, desert, sea, and ocean, all the way from Egypt to the Indian coast. It was not a short trip, and if you made it, you didn’t tend to just pop on the first boat back. You took “two years at least,” Goitein reckons, braving disasters at sea, piracy, and all the regular risks of business, the spoilage of goods, fluctuation in prices, and so on, and so on. And if something, anything, went awry—if losses were taken—well then you had better stay for longer still to make the whole production worthwhile and just to afford your return. You would be separated from those closest to you for those two years, with the possibility of many more to follow, something which is of course also very much a reality of the present for a great many people.
It was a difficult situation to be away from family back in Fustat for years at a time, difficult, but not totally uncommon. It was common enough that there were mechanisms by which such a merchant could at least financially look after their far-off family, and an expectation that they would do so, leaving money with a trusted figure and an agreement for regular payments to be provided and needs to be provided for, leaving, as you just heard about, a bill of divorce just in the case the worst should happen. This letter really illustrates some of the pressures of the situation, and is also just an incredible expression of emotion to be reading from 800 years ago.
In this case, the letter writer was a man named Solomon. He opened the letter with scripture, Psalms and Isaiah, and then with the words, “From their father who is yearning after them,” it apparently being indecent to address oneself directly to one’s wife, given that one never knew whose hands and eyes might find one’s letter. Astonishingly, given the much more personal material that follows, and its importance, the letter opens with grief at the death of a well-known judge and spiritual leader. “How deeply was I affected by his death,” wrote Solomon, “and by his being taken away from those who relied on him.” Then he turned that feeling toward his family.
“Would I try to describe the extent of my feeling of longing and yearning for you all the time, my letter would become too long and the words too many,” he wrote. “... I have read and scrutinized [your precious letters], and was happy to learn from them that you are well and healthy and that you have escaped from those great terrors, the like of which have not been experienced for many generations.” The terrors in question were the plague and famine that had recently devastated Egypt, the ones we talked of in the writing of Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, as he bore witness to the horrors of those first years of the 13th-century. Solomon was relieved that his far-off family had not, like so many others, been swallowed up by them. He was relieved, but clearly not free of other concerns.
“In your letters you alternately rebuke and offend me or put me to shame and use harsh words all the time,” he wrote. “I swear by God, I do not believe that the heart of anyone traveling away from his wife has remained like mine, all the time and during all the years—from the moment of our separation to the very hour of writing this letter—so constantly thinking of you and yearning after you and regretting to be unable to provide you with what I so much desire. ... to fulfill all your wishes, great and small, with regard to dresses or food or anything else.”
Solomon’s theme of rebuke and reprimand was repeated. “... you write about me as if I had forgotten you and would not remember you had it not been for your rebukes,” he wrote, “and as if, had you not warned me that the public would reprove me, I would not have thought of you.” This, he insisted, was the furthest thing from the truth. “You rebuke me [too] with regard to the ambergris,” he wrote, but “Had you known how much trouble and expenses I have incurred to get this ambergris for you, you would have said: there is nothing like it in the word.”
Our travelling trader, so far away, then sought to demonstrate this point, to show how he was not only not forgetting, but rather going above and beyond to achieve what he may for himself and his partner, who had been so unsatisfied with the quality or quantity of ambergris he’d acquired. Indeed, he wrote: “After I was resurrected from the dead and had lost all that I carried with me I took a loan of … dinars and travelled to countries beyond al-Ma’bar.” He had gone, he was saying, all the way to the Coromandel coast in the southeast of India, something few Jewish India traders did. He had gone beyond it, in order to make up for his losses. He was doing all he could.
“This was my way of life,” he wrote, “from the moment I left you until I arrived in Aden (and from there to India) and from India back to Aden:” where he presumably wrote this letter. “Day and night I was constantly drinking, not of my free will, but I conducted myself in an exemplary way and if anyone poked fun in foul speech in my presence, I became furious with him, until he became silent… . I constantly fulfilled what God knows, and cured my soul by fasting during the days and praying during the nights. The congregations in Aden and in India often asked me to lead them in prayer, and I am regarded by them and regard myself as a pious man.”
Clearly, Solomon very much wanted his wife to think the same, for she had a decision to make. She had, we read, insisted in her letters that she be set free, that she be granted a divorce, and this was what now drove Solomon to respond.
“If this is your wish,” he wrote, “I cannot blame you. For the waiting has been long. And I do not know whether the Creator will grant relief immediately so that I can come home, or whether matters will take time, for I cannot come home with nothing. Therefore I resolved to issue a writ which sets you free. Now the matter is in your hand. If you wish separation from me, accept … and you are free. But if this is not your decision and not your desire, do not lose these long years of waiting: perhaps relief is at hand and you will regret at a time when regret will be of no avail.
…
All day long I have a lonely heart and am pained by our separation. I feel that pain while writing these lines. But the choice is with you… .”
The choice, unfortunately, would not come down to us. Much of the concluding section of the letter is damaged, but it can be seen to convey greetings, to be passed along to the writer’s sister and husband, to his wife’s family and that of her paternal uncle, and so on. It mentions nutmeg, galangal, cloth, and odiferous wood that were being sent home to Egypt, the products of trade in India. And it includes no address. This letter was never sent.
By Goitein’s reading, Solomon may well have thought better of his frankness, perhaps of that talk of constant drinking, day and night. Perhaps, owing to the pressing and personal nature of the whole thing, he simply wanted to have another try at writing it before hitting send. Maybe he had reconsidered the divorce. Either way, it is noteworthy that the document came to be found in Fustat. The letter was not sent, but it made the journey anyway, presumably with Solomon, its writer.
Maybe he would have had other reasons for returning to Egypt, but Goitein’s guess is that this means his wife did not make the decision to divorce him, that if she had, then he would surely not have come home at all but instead would have had someone else finish up his arrangements and made a new life for himself in Aden.
Whatever he did, whatever choice his wife made, we will put their story aside here, and after this break, we will turn to another one.
…
Not all the stories that reach us from the past are entirely satisfying ones, for they rarely bring with them the full narrative arc, the complete background context, inciting incident, rise in action, climax, and resolution of it all. Their fragments might bring us beginnings, middles, or endings, or something like them. We have letters, like the ones of Solomon and Joseph, but such letters are not full lives. They are responses to the moment from one perspective, and certainly fascinating in their own right, but they do tend to leave one wondering about the rest of the story.
This next example reaches us from a different type of historical document, and gives us a bit of a fuller picture. It also forms quite a different kind of response, a rabbinic one.
Rabbinic responsa were legal documents communicating rulings on questions of Jewish law. In this case, we have two, and in the words of historian Judith R. Baskin, they give us “an in-depth portrait of a marriage in twelfth-century Cairo and of a woman’s life—in this instance a woman struggling to maneuver within the structure of Jewish law and contemporary Judeo-Arabic society.” We have seen, from one perspective, by what mechanisms and efforts matters were arranged for the one left behind when the other went away on business, often for years on end, but in this case, we will see what life was like when those supports were not there, what pressures resulted, and how one woman responded to them.
We don’t have names for the married couple in question. The two documents reach us without those, but they are widely agreed to both concern the same situation, the same couple, for the way time, place, and the details of the story coincide. There were surely all sorts of other documents concerning the pair that have not reached us at all, contracts regarding property, wills, marriage, and perhaps divorce. We do, however, have the name of the authority who wrote in judgment of their situation. It was Moses ben Maimon, Maimonides, and that puts it in the second half of the 12th century or the first years of the 13th, before Moses died.
We hear first from the husband’s perspective, his case put forward by the representative who presented his petition.
“Our rabbi will teach us concerning an incident whereby a Jew had a wife who had been with him for a number of years,” opens the document. “And in one of these years, he happened to take a trip in connection with personal matters and for business reasons, and he was absent from his city on and off for four years.”
It was a long time to be away from home, and when he returned, circumstances had changed. His wife’s brother had taken work as a children’s teacher, and having learned some Torah from her husband and more from her brother, she had joined him in that work. It obviously doesn’t sound particularly untoward to us, respectable work, and so on, or at least I, also a children’s teacher, though not one of the Torah, would say so. But the husband didn’t.
“It is not at all proper for you to teach these children,” he said, “for I fear that their fathers, … will come to visit the children, and you will be in an embarrassing position because of them, and I do not want this, neither for my sake nor for your sake.”
It is worth remembering here that Moses, the man who would be providing judgement as to all of this, would elsewhere write that, quote, “it is unseemly for a woman to be constantly going out abroad and into the streets, and the husband should prevent his wife from doing this and should not let her go out except for once or twice a month, as the need may arise. Rather,” he said, “the seemly thing for a woman is to sit in the corner of her house, for so it is written ‘All glorious is the king’s daughter within the palace.’”
So it might have been for the king’s daughter in the Book of Psalms, but of course, it was not always like that, did not always match with Maimonides’ ideal. You might think from this stance of his that no woman would be able to work at all, but of course they did.
Women of the period worked in textiles, in its manufacturing at all stages, in trade, selling products directly or to brokers, in, though in quite small numbers, food production. They were medical practitioners of different sorts, washers and mourners of the dead, preparers of brides and their ceremonies. They rented properties or lent money. Like our subject here, they taught.
Perhaps predictably, her husband’s words to the effect that she must cease that teaching had not produced his desired result.
She, in irritation, had, quote, “refrain[ed] from doing her duties.” Going on something of a strike, she had abandoned “kneading and cooking and making the bed and cleaning the house; washing clothes and fulfilling her duties to her sons—but she persisted in teaching the children at her brother’s from morning until evening.” Meanwhile, the husband found himself paying someone else whenever he needed something done, from cooking to laundry, and for four full years this awkward situation persisted, unhappily so for at least one of them. And you might be wondering why, if he was so perturbed by all of this, would he not have simply divorced her. We find, as to this, that he had his reasons, had very material ones.
The first was her part-ownership of the property along with her sister and his mother. He was afraid that she would simply take and sell her portion or else take it with her into a new marriage. It would leave him significantly poorer, and, the petition relates, cause “the sons he had with her [to be] destitute,” something he did not, as we shall see, seem generally to have been concerned about. Then there was the particular language of the marriage contract.
It had stipulations against his taking another wife or a, quote, “maidservant whom she despise[d],” and if he were to do so, then it said he would be forced to pay the fullness of the second marriage installment, the one which we talked about at the beginning of this episode, the one to be completed upon death or, as he would be forced to provide in this case, divorce. It was made clear that this was an option which she desired but which he did not.
This brought the case to its question: what should the man be allowed to do? Should he be able to, quote, “undertake a second marriage, so that the [new wife came under] his authority [while the first wife was prevented] from hastily selling the portion [of the property]? What was the requirement of the law as to every aspect of the situation?
To these questions, Moses answered that the man could not make a second marriage, not unless he paid that contracted marriage installment or had that first wife’s permission. However, he could prevent her from continuing in her teaching work, and the court could and should “admonish her and … deter her from doing this.” Furthermore, this prevention could not be grounds for divorce on her part. Quote, “all doors are locked before her and all paths are to be obstructed, and her affairs will be delayed for as long as it takes until she withdraws and agrees to behave properly toward her husband.” He wasn’t willing to just say the man could go and break his marriage contract—that was out of the question—but he did very much come down on the husband’s side of the whole affair.
A married woman was, in his view and as we see elsewhere in his writing, to keep busy with labour. “Her food against the work of her hands,” went the Talmudic formula, which he reiterated. There were tasks she was expected to do, and if there was no hired help, then she should, quote, “bake bread in the oven, cook food, wash clothes, nurse her child, put fodder before her husband’s mounts … and attend to the grinding of corn.” And there was that requirement for maintenance, the “food” and so on against the “work of her hands.” One wondered how our husband here could be said to have been fulfilling it.
As for our document at hand, “Thus,” it concluded, “wrote Moses,” but that was not the end, not nearly.
That was not an end to matters because the woman in question was herself not satisfied with this conclusion, and her representative put forward an appeal, bringing with it her own, much more detailed, perspective on the story.
“Concerning a man who married a nine-year-old and she had a portion in common property with her mother-in-law and her own sister, and they all live in one courtyard,” it begins, clarifying their property situation.
The mother-in-law had, at the outset, guaranteed that she would support the woman, then a young girl, for a full 10 years, but after 7 of those had said she could no longer manage. The husband only supported her for 2 months. The woman, still very young, became pregnant, giving birth to a boy, and when that boy was 9 months old, the husband then said that he needed to go abroad to make money. Leaving her with nothing, absolutely nothing, as the text has it, “for dinner that very evening, not for her and not for the baby,” he departed the city.
After three years spent in Syria and elsewhere, he returned, but now he had nothing to show for that time away, less than nothing actually, for he needed his father to pay his entry tax and his wife to deal with his poll tax, lest he be jailed for failing to do so. For two years, he remained in the city, and she again became pregnant, giving birth to another son. A second time, he went travelling, this time going away for a year and half, and again leaving her with nothing. A third time, this one for three years.
All the while, she had, and I keep using this word, nothing from him. She had no oil for the lamp, and knew lamplight only from visiting the home of his mother, with whom she shared that courtyard. Her sons faced terrible hunger, and at 25 years old, she was, quite understandably, exhausted by poverty.
She took to teaching with her brother in order to support herself and her sons. She did so for six years, and then, when her brother departed on a journey, did so in his stead for four years, taking her older boy, who had by then reached the age of 17, to speak with the fathers who came to collect their children while she was there for the mothers, the boy’s presence ensuring there was no impropriety, no breach of modesty of the sort that her husband complained of.
For 25 years, her appeal stated, she had been under the authority of that husband, and he did not do anything for her, providing no money for the poll tax or the boys’ education, for clothing or for shoes, no mat to spread beneath them when they slept, no oil for light or household goods. “Neither she nor the children,” it said, “had any pleasure from him, not even verbally, except for curses and foul language.” Day and night, he was at his mother’s, and what little he bought was for the two of them, not for his wife and children. But he claimed that he was the one who was unhappy, with her, to find that she had overstepped the bounds of modesty. “Either [end your teaching] and live in your house like everyone else or give me the right to wed [again],” he demanded, and as you already know, she refused. She told him to go ahead and divorce her if he wished to, but he was not willing to pay the price to take that step.
He tried to tell her that he would go out and borrow a dinar and use it for wheat, and that she wouldn’t need to go out to work then, that she should stay at home, but she could see well enough that this wasn’t sustainable. You’ll just leave the city again, she said, and leave me with no money. Meanwhile, I will try to return to work and find my students all gone, their parents having taken them to other teachers, and I and the boys will again have nothing.
With all this context given, then came the questions. Did she need to leave her profession? Did she need to serve this man who didn’t provide her with anything at all? Did she need to permit him to marry another?
To these considerations, to this additional information on the case, Moses gave his answer.
On the one hand, he said a husband may stop a wife from teaching a craft or reading. On the other, the law required that a husband be made to fulfill his wife’s needs, food, clothing, and otherwise, and that if he could not, then he must divorce her and pay that second marriage installment, if he had the money. Moses’ conclusion seemed to hinge on an acceptance that in this case, the man decidedly did not. “The way of circumvention for this woman,” he wrote, “if her words are words of truth, is for her to ‘rebel’ and leave without the [last marriage installment]; … he is then forced [by the rabbinic court] to divorce her and she will be her own woman, [free to] teach whomever she pleases and do whatever she pleases.”
She would have her property and she would have her teaching practice, one which she had established through hard work, necessitated by the lack of support from her husband and the fullness of that owed by his family. She wouldn’t get the last of what her marriage contract had promised, but then she was never going to get that anyways, as was surely known to her, to her surrounding community, and to Moses as he issued his judgment and suggested a way out.
It’s worth noting that he did not say that a woman could not teach, nor that a married woman in particular could not, but he did say that her husband may prevent her, should he choose to. Judith Baskin observes that it’s difficult to know how common the profession was for women of this time and place, but there are references to it in 11th-century Cairo and to somewhere being known as the “Synagogue of the Women Teachers,” so there were clearly at least some women doing this work.
It’s also worth noting the degree to which the men in this woman’s life were mobile, how they seem to have often been travelling. Her brother, the teacher, was away for years, no mention of when or if he returned. Her husband was frequently away, gone for at least three multi-year terms, at least one of them to Damascus, and apparently not prevented from doing so by his chronic lack of money. What was he doing on these trips? Presumably seeking some sort of income, but clearly without much success. His poverty was a condition one would have much more sympathy for were it not for his behaviour, his persistent failure to support his wife and children along with his attempt to then secure a second wife, one who might then take on the household duties that his first had rather understandably elected not to perform.
She now had the option to forgo the last of what her childhood marriage had offered, to take that portion of the property and her business in teaching, and one assumes she took that option.
We’ll now leave her story, that of her husband and sons, along with those of Solomon and Joseph. I hope you enjoyed them.