Chapter 4

Muslims in the Indian Ocean

The rise of Islam in the Hijaz in the early seventh century affected the Indian Ocean in several important ways. Describing these changes will be the main concern of this chapter, which uses material from the period up to the end of the fifteenth century. In this period there was both continuity and change. It would certainly be incorrect to write of an Islamic period or ocean. Many others traded and travelled, and coastal routes remained relatively unchanged. However, over a few centuries most of the population of the coasts of the Indian Ocean became Muslims, so that a large share of both coastal and oceanic trade was handled by the adherents of this new religion. It was much more centralised than was either Hinduism or Buddhism. This was especially manifested in the requirement, one of the most basic tenets of the faith, that if at all possible Muslims should perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, at least once in a lifetime. A Muslim community developed around the shores of the Indian Ocean, linked by religion, whose commonality, while this must not be exaggerated, was created and reinforced by travelling scholars. Yet Islam's success was to a large extent a result of its tolerance of local traditions, so that scholars distinguish between prayers and other religious activities in the mosque, and those performed outside it. Rather than the coastal populations converting to Islam, they accepted it.

What was the attitude of the new religion to sea matters and to merchants? As to the latter, the normative position was well set out by the great fourteenth century social scientist Ibn Khaldun. He claimed countrymen were morally superior to townsmen, with merchants lower again: 'traders must buy and sell and seek profits. This necessitates flattery and evasiveness, litigation and disputation, all of which are characteristic of this profession. And these qualities lead to a decrease and weakening in virtue and manliness.'1 Some claim that normative Islam had a similarly negative attitude to sea travel. The Arabs as men of the desert used to be the prevalent western stereotype: they rode camels, not ships. Today we realise that Muslims had an early and very successful interest in sea trade. The first Arab sea migration was to Abyssinia, in the time of the prophet. On several occasions in the previous chapter we described Arabs engaging in extensive sea voyages. This continued when Arabs became Muslims.

Authentic Islamic sources display a positive attitude to the sea. The Quran itself has several passages which speak approvingly of sea trade and maritime matters. As the Holy Book says, 'And of His signs is this: He sendeth herald winds to make you taste His mercy, and that the ships may sail at His command, and that ye may seek His favour, and that haply ye may be thankful.' And again: 'your Lord is He who driveth for you the ship upon the sea that ye may seek of His bounty' or 'Allah it is Who hath made the sea of service unto you that the ships may run thereon by His command, and that ye may seek of His bounty.'2 And again: 'It is He who subjected to you the sea, that you may eat of it fresh flesh, and being forth out of it ornaments for you to wear, and thou may best see the ships cleaving through it, and that you may seek of His bounty, and so haply you will be thankful.' Similarly, the Caliph Umar II was quoted as saying 'Dry land and sea belong alike to God; He hath subdued them to His servants to seek of his bounty for themselves in both of them.'3

We have seen that the Indian Ocean was already a place of movement, circulation, contacts and travel over great distances. It could be that Islam fits well into this sort of environment. Later Malay literature powerfully links notions of the sea, God, man and the transitory nature of the world. The sea is a trope for Islam. 'O Seeker, this world is like a wave. God's condition is like the sea. Even though the wave is different from the sea, it is in reality nothing but the sea.'4

We now have much more detail on the ships venturing out over our ocean. At the most humble level, even today one sees coastal fishers, some merely astride a log, rising and falling, vanishing and appearing, in the swell. Coastal craft, used by fisherfolk, and as lighters to take people and goods to larger ships standing off shore where no harbour or estuary was available, were described in the previous chapter. These accounts related mostly to the east coast of India, where the lack of good harbours necessitated lighters. Over much of the rest of the littoral there were estuaries or harbours, and it was here that the famous dhows were found. These larger ships however had many of the characteristics of the coastal craft we have previously described.

The term 'dhow' is used by westerners for a variety of craft, large and small, which dominated most trade and navigation in the western Indian Ocean for centuries. There are many different types, depending on size and location, yet they did share enough common characteristics for us to use a generic term for them.5 The actual word is not Arabic. It probably comes from the Persian word dawh. They have attracted much attention from a truly international array of scholars.6 These 'traditional' dhows were found all over the western Indian Ocean, that is from east Africa around to south India, and at times much further east. This type of ship long-predates the arrival of Islam. It presumably has Gulf or Red Sea origins, but we know little about ships before Islam.

Marco Polo, writing about Hurmuz, left a detailed, accurate, and rather negative account:

Their ships are wretched affairs, and many of them get lost; for they have no iron fastenings, and are only stitched together with twine made from the husk of the Indian nut [coconut]. They beat this husk until it becomes like horse-hair, and from that they spin twine, and with this stitch the planks of the ship together. It keeps well, and is not corroded by the sea-water, but it will not stand well in a storm. The ships are not pitched, but are rubbed with fish oil. They have one mast, one sail, and one rudder, and have no deck, but only a cover spread over the cargo when loaded. This cover consists of hides, and on the top of these hides they put the horses which they take to India for sale. They have no iron to make nails of, and for this reason they use only wooden trenails in their shipbuilding, and then stitch the planks with twine as I have told you. Hence 'tis a perilous business to go a voyage in one of those ships, and many of them are lost, for in that Sea of India the storms are often terrible.7

A Muslim pilgrim in the Red Sea in the late twelfth century left a rather similar account. Ibn Jubayr wrote:

The jilab that ply on this Pharaonic sea [that is, the Red Sea from Aydhab to Jiddah] are sewn together, no nails at all being used on them. They are sewn with cord made from... the fibre of the coconut and which the makers thrash until it takes the form of thread, which then they twist into a cord with which they sew the ships. These they then caulk with shavings of the wood of palm-trees. When they have finished making a jilabah in this fashion, they smear it with grease, or castor oil, or the oil of the shark, which is best. This shark is a huge fish which swallows drowning men. Their purpose in greasing the boat is to soften and supple it against the many reefs that are met with in that sea, and because of which nailed ships do not sail through it. The wood for these parts is brought from India and the Yemen, as is the coconut fibre. A singular feature of these jilab is that their sails are woven from the leaves of the muql tree [a kind of gum-tree], and their parts are conformably weak and unsound in structure. Glory to God who contrives them in this fashion and who entrusts men to them. There is no God but He.'8

What then are the main characteristics of these craft? As these contemporaries pointed out, teak from Malabar in southwest India was used almost universally, for this was highly resistant to decay, and provided it was treated properly, along the lines suggested by Ibn Jubayr, it would not split, crack or shrink in salt water. This wood was used to make a hull using the carvel method: that is, the wooden planks of the hull were laid edge to edge, not overlapping as in western ships. They were held together by coir fibre stitching which passed through holes in the planks. There was no iron or bolts, and no ribbing or framework. However, wooden dowels were used, at least on the bigger boats, for strength. The hull was made watertight by inserting resin or other materials between the planks. This has to be differentiated from the European practice of caulking, which was done after the ship was assembled. They had no keels, but instead used either sandbags, or heavy parts of the cargo, as ballast in the bottom of the hold. These dhows had stern post rudders, with ropes attached, not a tiller. One pulled on ropes to steer the vessel. Most had only one mast, and a sail made of matting, though late in our period cloth was also beginning to be used.9

The hulls were double ended rather than having square, transom, sterns. On the largest dhows there may have been a raised poop deck, with cabins underneath, but most often the holds were open and there was no deck. As Correia observed in Cannanor around 1500:

in lieu of decks, the hold was built up with huts and compartments for merchandise, covered with plaited palm-leaf thatch, acting as a roof; the water would flow down to their sides, then along the hull and gather at the bottom of the hold where it could be bailed out, thus not wetting the merchandise which was kept well packed into these compartments. On top of these thatched roofs, they would dispose strong cane lattice-work, on which one could walk without damaging the huts below.... People have their lodgings on top, for nobody stays below, where the merchandise is found.

Remarkably heavy cargo, camels, horses, even elephants, could be carried.10

Figure 1 A Terry Dinghee. Etching. © National Maritime Museum, London

Figure 2 Indian Sailing Boats. New mount. Produced by Thomas Daniell (artist). © National Maritime Museum, London

The lack of metal in the construction excited much comment, most of it negative, from European observers, such as Marco Polo who we quoted above. The fabulist Sir John Mandeville claimed they did not use nails as there were magnetic islands which would draw to them any ship which contained metal.11 At first glance the lack of metal condemns dhows as primitive craft indeed, yet their method of construction was well suited to conditions in the Indian Ocean. As Ibn Battuta wrote, 'The Indian and Yemenite ships are sewn together with them, for that sea is full of reefs, and if a ship is nailed with iron nails it breaks up on striking the rocks, whereas if it is sewn together with cords, it is given a certain resilience and does not fall to pieces.' In Cambay he wrote of the Gulf that 'it is navigable for ships and its waters ebb and flow. I myself saw the ships lying on the mud at ebb-tide and floating on the water at high tide.'12 Their flexibility, thanks to the coir, meant that they were well adapted to the sandy shores of large parts of the Indian Ocean littoral. They could be driven ashore by storms, or deliberately to unload cargo or undergo repairs or careening, and even in the breakers off the Coromandel coast their flexibility enabled them to 'give' and survive, where a more rigidly built ship would have shattered.

A considerable quantity of coir thread or rope was needed: Tim Severin built a quite small replica dhow, yet it used up about 400 miles of rope!13 The coir had to be kept in salt water to prevent deterioration, as Bowrey noted:

The Cables, Strapps, &c. are made of Cayre, vizt. the Rhine of Coco nuts very fine Spun, the best Sort of which is brought from the Maldiva Isles. They are as Stronge as any hempen Cables whatever, and much more durable in these hott climates, with this provisor, that if they chance to be wet with fresh water, either by raine or rideinge in a fresh River, they doe not let them drye before they wett them well in Salt water, which doth much preserve them, and the Other as much rott them.14

The coconut tree was a great provider of useful products. Indeed, in the Maldive and Laccadive islands ships were built entirely from this tree: the hull, masts, stitches, ropes, and sails. As noted, most other areas used teak for the hulls, but the sails were usually woven from the leaves of palm or coconut trees; cotton sailcloth apparently came in later, though possibly before 1500.15

These sails were the famous triangular lateen sails so evident even today in the Indian Ocean. The name is a misnomer, as it comes from the time of the Crusades, when western Europeans first saw them, and called them the Latin sail, from the French une voile latine. They had been used by the Arabs for some centuries before the Common Era, and were the first sails which allowed a ship to beat into the wind. As compared with European square sails, a lateen rigged ship can sail well with the wind abeam, that is 90° against the direction of travel, and even reasonably well with the wind forward of the beam, at 50° or even 60° off the bow. Some authorities say dhows tack straight across the wind as a modern yacht does, but in fact they changed course by wearing around, stern to wind, instead of tacking.16

Lateen sails are often described as a 'gift of the Arabs' to western sailors. However, Campbell claims that they developed independently in several places. Their origin may be from Persia, rather than pre-Islamic Arabia, and it could be that they reached the Mediterranean via Persia. They were found in the Mediterranean from the beginning of the Common Era, and he suggests that Arabs then learnt to use them from earlier users in both the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Very similarly shaped sails evolved independently in eastern Indonesia and were used in the great voyages in the Pacific by Austronesian peoples which we mentioned in the previous chapter (page 60). Campbell claims that they are not particularly effective sails anyway, though this obviously raises the question of why they were used for so many centuries.17

To make the dhow watertight was only one reason for treating the wood. Equally important was to deter the accumulation of barnacles and other growths on the hull. Of these, the most dangerous was teredo, or shipworm, a ravenous mollusc which wreaked havoc in tropical waters. Severin described their rapid penetration. He found that if it was not treated, the timber in his replica dhow was nearly destroyed after two months. Even after this short time wormholes as big as knitting needles appeared, and one could snap with bare hands panels 2½ inches thick.18

The traditional solution was to smear the hull every two months or so with a combination of boiled animal or fish fat and crushed lime. In the absence of dry docks this required running the vessel aground, but thanks to the flexibility of the construction this could be done easily and safely. There were two processes involved. The carvel method of construction meant that resin was used to fill gaps between the planks while the boat was being built, but then the process of greasing and smearing was done routinely during the life of the vessel.

The navigator of the dhow in our period, such as the famous fifteenth century sailor Ibn Majid, was the mu'allim, who sailed the ship and was responsible for what happened on board. He checked the fitting out, stores, gear, and loading. He was in charge of the crew and passengers, looked after their safety and health and solved their quarrels. All this was laid down in the contract drawn up before the ship left. It was required to take a set number of passengers, and a set quantity of their effects. There were also bills of lading governing the cargo. His duty of care ended when he got the ship back to its home port. Ibn Majid also advised the captain to

Be quick to make a decision.... It is necessary when you sail to be clean.... Forbid all those who sail from making fun of others on the sea; it will only result in evil, hatred and enmity and he who does this continually will not be spared from grudge or hatred or contempt.... Consult other people and improve your own opinion.19

Dhows of one sort or another were the dominant form all over the western Indian Ocean. Their sizes covered a wide range, from less than 50 tons up to perhaps 500. Different sizes had different names. A major variation was the ships built in Gujarat, which in the period before Europeans were the largest in this region, being up to 800 tons, and on average 300 to 600 tons. By contrast, when Magellan set off to sail around the world he had five ships, the largest of which was only 120 tons and 31 metres long. In 1577 Drake sailed out of Plymouth with three ships. One was a bit over 100 tons, the other two only 80 and 30 tons.20 The early Portuguese found these Gujarati ships to be formidable indeed: 'these ships are so powerful and well armed and have so many men that they dare to sail this route [from Melaka to the Red Sea] without fear of our ships.'21 While these large Gujarati ships still usually had no deck, their construction was different, as a process called rabetting, rather like tongue and groove, was used to join the planks together.22 An English traveller around 1750 praised these ships highly:

Surat ships last much longer than Europe ships, even a century, because they are so solidly built, the planks in their bottom and sides being let into one another in the nature of rabbet work. The knees are natural shape not warped, or forced by fire. Teak is as good as oak, and bottoms rubbed with wood oil keep planks from decay.

Grose also approved of the coir rigging: 'more harsh and intractable than what is produced from hemp', but they lasted longer than hemp in salt water. Even the cotton sails were fine: true, they were not as strong as European canvas, but they were less liable to split.23

Barbosa's account of Calicut very early in the sixteenth century seems to point to another regional variation, that is the use of keels. He wrote of the pardesi Muslims, those from the Red Sea and Egypt, that

In the days of their prosperity in trade and navigation they built in the city keeled ships of a thousand and a thousand and two hundred bahares burden [about 250 tonnes]. These ships were built without any nails, but the whole of the sheathing was sewn with thread, and all upper works differed much from the fashion of ours, they had no decks.24

Once we round Cape Comorin and enter the Bay of Bengal we encounter very different ships. Some of them were great Chinese ships, which sailed in the Bay of Bengal and around to Malabar until the mid fifteenth century. We have a charming account of Song sailing from a Chinese source:

The ships which sail the southern sea and south of it are like houses. When their sails are spread they are like great clouds in the sky. Their rudders are several tens of feet long. A single ship carries several hundred men, and has in the stores a year's supply of grain. Pigs are fed and wine fermented on board. There is no account of dead or living, no going back to the mainland when the people have set forth on the azure-blue sea. When the gong sounds at daybreak aboard ship, the animals can drink their fill, and crew and passengers alike forget all dangers. To those on board, everything is hidden and lost in space – mountains, landmarks, and foreign countries. The pilot may say, 'To make such and such a country, with a favourable wind, in so many days, we should sight such and such a mountain, [then] the ship may steer in such and such a direction.' But suddenly the wind may fall, and may not be strong enough to allow the sighting of the mountain on the given day. In such a case, the bearing may have to be changed. Then again, the ship may be carried far beyond [the landmark] and lose its bearing. A gale may spring up, blowing the ship off course, or the ship may encounter shoals or hidden rocks and be broken apart to the roofs [of the cabins]. A great ship with heavy cargo has nothing to fear in high seas, but in shallow water it will come to grief.25

Two foreign travellers, Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, left more detailed descriptions. Marco Polo described the ships he saw in the thirteenth century on the Fujian coast. They had only one deck,

though each of them contains some 50 or 60 cabins, wherein the merchants abide greatly at their ease, every man having one to himself. The ship hath but one rudder, but it hath four masts; and sometimes they have two additional masts, which they ship and unship at pleasure. Moreover the larger of their vessels have some thirteen [watertight] compartments or severances in the interior, made with planking strongly framed, in case maybe the ship should spring a leak, either by running on a rock or by the blow of a hungry whale.... The fastenings are all of good iron nails and the sides are double, one plank laid over the other, and caulked outside and in. The planks are not pitched, for those people do not have any pitch, but they daub the sides with another matter, deemed by them far better than pitch; it is this. You may see them take some lime and some chopped hemp, and these they knead together with a certain wood-oil; and when the three are thoroughly amalgamated, they hold like any glue. And with this mixture they do paint their ships.

Each of these great ships carried 200 or 300 sailors. If the wind dropped sweeps were used, each taking four sailors to row. They also each had two or three large tenders attached, with 50 or 60 sailors on each, and ten smaller boats to catch fish, bring supplies, and lay out anchors. These were slung to the side of the big ship, and put in the water as needed. Repairs were easy: they merely nailed another layer of planks over the existing ones.26

Ibn Battuta found a vast array of vessels in Calicut in the early fourteenth century, from Java, Ceylon, the Maldives, Yemen and Fars. However, the greatest were thirteen Chinese vessels. His eyewitness account is of very large ships indeed. He wrote that they were called junks, and had up to twelve sails, and 1,000 men on board, 600 of them sailors and 400 archers and other soldiers. All this may sound incredible, yet Ibn Battuta has a reputation for veracity, and he did travel on one of these ships himself. The oars were as large as the masts on the dhows with which he was familiar, and each was worked by ten or fifteen men. His ship had four decks,

and it has cabins, suites and salons for merchants; a set of rooms has several rooms and a latrine; it can be locked by its occupant, and he can take along with him slave-girls and wives. Often a man will live in his suite unknown to any of the others on board until they meet on reaching some town. The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they cultivate green stuffs, vegetables and ginger in wooden tanks. The owner's factor on board ship is like a great amir. When he goes on shore he is preceded by archers and Abyssinians with javelins, swords, drums, bugles and trumpets.27

These great Chinese ships sailed south through the Malay world and on to India, and sometimes even beyond this. However, this was a rather temporary presence. They came south to the Malay world only from the twelfth century, and may have been displaced for a time in the mid fourteenth century when the powerful Javanese state of Majapahit was at its height. Under the Ming, from 1368 Chinese ships re-entered southeast Asian waters, reaching a massive peak with the Zheng He expeditions of the early fifteenth century. Soon after this, long-distance Chinese voyaging in these monsters ended.

In the Malay world most of the local craft were small craft, capable of sailing between the myriad islands. As elsewhere, the vast majority of boats were humble things used by fishers, or for short fair-weather voyages using the monsoons. However, Manguin claims that from the early first millennium of the Common Era maritime powers in the region, that is especially Srivijaya and later Majapahit, built, owned and operated ocean-going ships of considerable size, up to 700 tons burthen and carrying up to 1,000 people. These were not exactly junks, for while Chinese ships had used nails for centuries, these ships did not. Nor were they sewn; rather they were held together with dowels. There was, following Chinese practice, multiple sheathing of the hull. The steering gear was different from dhows, for they had double quarter-rudders, and two to four masts and sails. Manguin claims, controversially, that these large ships were distinctively southeast Asian. This statement is to be seen as part of the general historiographical tendency to see this region as having a creativity and culture of its own, not as a passive recipient of high culture from the north or the west, that is from China or India.28 Rather mysteriously, these ships vanished in the later sixteenth century, possibly because they could not stand up to Portuguese cannon.

How did captains find their way over the ocean? There is a contrast here between blue water sailing and finding one's way in more restricted waterways. In the treacherous Red Sea, Ibn Jubayr was very impressed with the navigational skills of sailors in these confined waters: 'We observed the art of these captains and the mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs. It was truly marvellous. They would enter the narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable.'29 To a considerable extent, navigation was still like the way finding we described in the previous chapter (see page 56). It was a matter of the run of the water, experience, birds, seaweed, fishes, and sightings of known areas of land. Experienced navigators often wrote down what they had learnt. The most famous was Ibn Majid, who in the following passage, just like the Song source we quoted earlier, is using land sightings for guidance. When approaching Calicut, he says, 'look out for the hill between the mountains which are above the coast and there is no other such hill in these places and nothing so useful as a guide especially in the dark and its sides slope steeply.' When one is approaching from the north the ship should stay in about four and three-quarters fathoms of water until this hill is north-north-east of you, then approach the coast until the water is four and one-half fathoms and the hill becomes north by east and then north, and so on.30

Ibn Majid's work is an example of the pilot guides and navigational literature which were commonplace in the ocean. This geographical literature, from both the Chinese and the Arab side, showed that both knew the whole ocean, though Arabs found a limit at Madagascar. Ibn Majid wrote that 'to its south is the sea known to the Greeks as Uqiyanus which is known to the Arabs as the 'Ocean which encircles the world.' Here is the beginning of the southern Dark regions to the south of this island.'31 Tibbetts claims that there really was no exclusivity in nautical knowledge. Rather there was a common body of knowledge shared by Arabs, Chinese, Indians and Malays. It may be that practical navigational charts were not known before the Europeans, but there certainly were maps, as we will see. Charts may not have even been necessary, for navigation, apart from the use of wayfaring techniques, was done by observing the sun and the stars.32 In this the Arabs were simply following tradition, for the Beduin had long done this to find their way across the desert.

Again Ibn Jubayr tells us about this use. He was going on pilgrimage to Mecca, and embarked at Aydhab bound for Jiddah. They left on their jilabah, and on the evening of the second day there

rose a storm which darkened the skies and at last covered them. The tempest raged and drove the ship from off its course and backwards. The fury of the wind continued, and the darkness thickened and filled the air so that we knew not which way lay our course. Then a few stars appeared and gave us some guidance. The sail was lowered to the bottom of the mast, and we passed that night in a storm which drove us to despair....33

More usually either the North or Pole Star or the sun was used as a referent, and latitude was worked out from their height, measured in finger widths. The compass was apparently already known, as it had been long used by the Chinese, but it seems not to have been very widely used. In any case, it has been claimed that Arab empirical methods were more than adequate to determine latitude quite accurately. Based largely on a technical analysis of Ibn Majid's famous work, Clark claimed that the methods he describes compare well with modern stellar methods using spherical trigonometry, the navigational triangle and data from nautical publications. In sum, we can perhaps claim that during this period Arab navigation was a mixture of a craft mystery, based on accumulated oral tradition, and an applied science, the latter being the dominant technique today. In Europe the latter was becoming dominant in the sixteenth century.34

While Arab navigation may ideally have served the sailors well, contemporary accounts do not always give an impression of 'scientific' exactitude on board ship. One tale from the first half of the tenth century, no doubt based on real experience but with some embroidery, concerns a man called Allama, who was going from India to China. It came the time for the dawn prayer, so he went to the lavatory to do ablutions. Then he looked at the sea and was terrified. He forgot his ablutions and prayers, and instead rushed up on deck and got the men to lower the sails, and throw overboard all the cargo. Then he got everyone to purify themselves and pray. Sure enough, a huge storm came up that night, and only this ship survived. A similar account tells of Captain Abhara, a native of Kirman, where he was a shepherd. Later he became a sea captain, and went to China seven times, which was unheard of as it was so dangerous. 'If a man reached China without dying on the way, it was already a miracle. Returning safe and sound was unheard of. I have never heard tell of anyone, except him, who had made the two voyages there and back without mishap.' Other similar tales make Arab navigation sound very ad hoc indeed. The same Abhara knew that on the way to China on each thirtieth day the water went down very greatly and ships ran onto rocks, especially as a violent gale would come up at the same time. Another captain proffered that 'if you want to know whether or not you are near land or a mountain, look out after the afternoon prayer, when the sun is going down. At that time, if you are opposite a mountain or an island, you will see it distinctly.'35

European map making was revolutionised following Marco Polo's journey to and from China in 1271–92. Drawing on this, Europeans produced two famous maps, greatly in advance of what they had done before: the Catalan map of 1375, and especially Fra Mauro's map of 1458. East Asia had relatively sophisticated charts and maps by at least the fifteenth century.36 Mills has discussed in detail the Mao K'un map, which refers to the time of Zheng He's voyages.37 He considers it to be far superior to European maps of the same time, when the Portuguese had just started voyaging down the west African coast. This Chinese chart goes all the way from East Asia to India, and on to Persia, Arabia and East Africa. Mills' claim is that obviously Europeans did better in mapping the west, and Chinese the east; Chinese superiority is seen in their much better attempt to map the area in between, that is Arabia, India, and East Africa. This Chinese map showed a more accurate knowledge over a much larger area of the world than was available to Europeans at the same time. Several of their accounts depict a western and an eastern ocean, with the division at the Straits of Singapore. This is seen most clearly in the account by Wang Dayuan, who travelled extensively in the 1330s.38 My own brief to a large extent follows this division, for most of the time I also stop around these straits.

Even more extraordinary is the Korean Kangnido Map of 1402, which seems to draw on earlier Chinese and Arab works. It has clear delineations of Africa and the Arabian peninsular, and a recognisable outline of Europe, though India is submerged in the Chinese continent. Not surprisingly, Korea is shown as very large indeed, as large as all Africa. At a time when Europeans knew almost nothing of East Asia, this map has a clearly recognisable Mediterranean Sea, and Iberia, Italy and the Adriatic Sea. There are some hundred as yet unidentified place names in the Europe area, and about thirty-five in Africa, most of them on the southern Mediterranean coast.39

Another example of sophisticated map making comes from Java, and like the previous two shows that there was a large degree of interaction and exchange of knowledge between map makers at this time. In 1512 the Portuguese captain Albuquerque was shown a Javanese chart which delineated the Cape of Good Hope, Portugal, Brazil, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the country where the gold is (Minangkabau in Sumatra), the clove islands, the Malukus, Java, the Banda islands, Siam, the navigation of the Chinese, and the courses followed by their ships. All the names are marked in Javanese script.40 This sort of interchange extended in some surprising directions. The Chinese, even if they did not travel, certainly picked up much information at second or third hand. One eighth-century Chinese author described the people of Bobali, which is somewhere in northern East Africa. They 'eat only meat. They often stick a needle into the veins of cattle and draw blood which they drink raw, mixed with milk.' Intriguing to find that this is clearly a description of the same people whom a sixteenth-century Portuguese cleric found. He wrote of the Segeju that 'They own much cattle, the milk and blood thereof being to them as food; they eat the flesh raw without any other manner of ordinary food, as it is said, and they bleed the oxen every other day.'41

Finally, another Muslim example, this time the Turk Piri Reis and his magnificent Kitab, completed in 1521 and now available in a stunning four volume facsimile edition with translation. He wrote of the 'great sea', that is the all-encircling sea:

All the others are united with the Bahr-Azam. The Ocean is the sea into which they are all collected. It encircles the world. It is the head of all the seas; from it all seas emerge and to it all return. As I have told you, the fact is that all the other seas are but gulfs of the Ocean. The sea is like a tree that spreads everywhere left and right. The source of them all is the Ocean, of which they are the branches and twigs.

He described the Portuguese voyages to India, and among other places identified Madeira, Cape Verde, Brazil, Abyssinia, and Mogadishu, which he says is near the entrance to the Red Sea. Below 55° S all is Darkness, and similarly above 55° N. He has a brief account of China, which he says is based on what the Portuguese say, and then a fabulous account of an island with all sorts of monstrous people, based on 'those who voyaged there'. His account of India is rather vague, and he thinks it is winter in India when it is summer in Europe. A few years after this Kitab he drew a map of the Atlantic which included the North American coast from Greenland to Florida, and was quite accurate.42

We have already quoted the famous Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta several times. This much-travelled scholar left a copious account of his travels and adventures all around the Indian Ocean and beyond, for he also visited many parts of Europe and West Africa; indeed he came from Morocco. In sum he covered 75,000 miles in a period of nearly thirty years. His travels date from the first half of the fourteenth century. In the rest of this chapter I intend to use him as a 'tin opener', to introduce the various topics I want to cover in this account of the Indian Ocean to about 1500. Each section will start with his observations, and will introduce my general discussion of the relevant topic, the latter based on other contemporary, and much secondary, literature. My intention here is rather different from Ross Dunn's.43 He has provided an excellent account of Ibn Battuta's travels and much detail to locate his descriptions. However, I will use his account merely to open up general matters to do with the Indian Ocean, such as port cities, piracy, the dangers of travels by sea, Muslim attitudes to sea travel, and especially his frequent mentions of a network of Islamic scholars, of whom he was one, who were spread all around the ocean, travelling frequently, and serving to spread and consolidate the faith. We will start with this topic.

We described in the previous chapter many Buddhist and Hindu people travelling to service or convert kings and others in southeast Asia, and a reverse flow of Buddhist pilgrims, especially from East Asia, going to India to see the holy places. However, the first of these declined as Buddhism declined in India. It was replaced by a circulation of students and pilgrims to the new centres of the faith, especially Sri Lanka, Burma and Thailand. The fact that Buddhism in India was slowly sucked back into a new Hinduism similarly meant that fewer from outside now wanted to visit the homeland of the faith, though some pilgrims continued to come, and indeed still do, to see the holy places associated with the life of the Buddha. Nevertheless, by this time the dominant religious circulation in the Indian Ocean was being done by Muslims, and Ibn Battuta gives us numerous accounts of such people.

In 1331 he was in Mogadishu. As a man of learning Ibn Battuta was very well treated, and lodged with the qadi. The Sultan spoke Arabic, but his first language was Maqdishi. Ibn Battuta was taken by the qadi, who had originated in Egypt, to the sultan. As a man who had come from al-Hijaz he was treated with respect. He was given robes, including a tunic of Egyptian linen, a furred mantle of Jerusalem stuff, and an Egyptian turban. There were many jurists, sharifs, sheikhs and people who had done a hajj in Mogadishu. Ibn Battuta then went on to Kilwa, then at its height of power and riches. He found the sultan to be very generous, and commented on the large number of sharifs from Iraq and the Hijaz and other countries who had flocked in to benefit from his pious patronage.44

Once he got to Malabar, Ibn Battuta found a similarly diverse assemblage of Muslims in positions of secular and religious authority. At one place the qadi and preacher was a man from Oman. The amir (leader) of the merchants in Calicut was from Bahrain. On one of the junks that he travelled on the factor was from Syria, while in Quilon the chief Muslim merchant was from Iraq, and the qadi from Qazwin.45

What our traveller is describing is a vast network of Muslims all around the periphery of the Indian Ocean. He was welcomed everywhere as a prestigious scholar, an exemplar of the faith. Yet our hero was not really a very prestigious person in the Muslim heartland. He would have been unlikely to flourish in Mecca or Damascus or Cairo, but he was a big fish in Delhi and other newer Islamic places such as the Swahili coast where rulers were keen to implant and strengthen Islam. His perhaps surprisingly cordial reception in so many places was probably helped by his own very strong sense of his own worth. He was rather self-important, and judgemental to a fault of other Muslims. He took it on himself to correct people who got things wrong, even merely in matters of pronunciation.

Ibn Battuta opens up three related matters, which were among the most significant occurring in the Indian Ocean in our period: conversions to Islam, and then efforts to consolidate the faith, and ties back to the centre. In our period, to the end of the fifteenth century, the first is most important, for this was the time when the relatively new religion spread rapidly. It will be remembered that the Prophet died in 632 CE. The faith spread rapidly by both land and sea from its origins in the Hijaz area of western Arabia: to Persia, Egypt, North Africa, areas now known as Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and even to northwest India in its first century. It also spread by sea, carried by existing Arab trade networks, which we found going back some centuries before these traders were converted to the new faith. It is this which will occupy our attention, more than the continuing matter, even to today, of the travels of Muslim scholars whose aim is to improve the observance of an existing Muslim community all around the ocean, to root out practices seen to be un-Islamic, and to rectify back-sliding. In short, we are looking at the creation of the community, rather than its consolidation. The latter will not be totally ignored, but it will be considered more fully in later chapters.

The cosmopolitan, international, aspect of Islam has often been cited as a prime motivation for conversion. Coastal people especially find their indigenous beliefs, localised and very specific, to be inadequate as their world expands. When they are exposed to a universal faith (in the case of the East African coast Islam was represented in their foreign business partners), the attraction is obvious, and can be widely seen all over the Indian Ocean world at this time.46

Parkin has suggested that it is more accurate to write of the

'acceptance' of Islam, which is likely to take longer and to be reciprocally inscribed in pre-existing custom and cosmology. The term conversion pre-supposes a shift from one to another unambiguously defined religion. Acceptance is less visibly dramatic and does not mean abandonment of a pre-existing cosmology. Yet it may well typify much Islamisation in the region in allowing for Islamic and non-Islamic traits to inter-mingle steadily.47

This means that we are looking at additive change much of the time, as opposed to substitutive change. The former implies that an existing body of belief is added to, while the latter means existing notions are cast aside and replaced. Conversion then is a process rather than an event, and may extend over several generations.

There is also the matter of coercion and the use of power, whether explicit or implicit. No doubt in many inland areas Islam spread in part through coercion. It is not a matter of Islam spreading at the point of a sword, but rather that as Muslim armies conquered huge territories many of the conquered adopted the religion of their new masters. This applies in most of the Middle East. However, in India, where the northwest was ruled by Muslims from the eighth century, and the north Indian heartland from the thirteenth, Hinduism proved remarkably resilient, so that only perhaps 10 per cent of the population accepted the religion of the sultans. In sociological terms, most Hindus had a firmly entrenched higher tier of belief already, and were not inclined to change to another, Islamic, one. In our area of concern, the Indian Ocean littoral, there was no opportunity for pressure of any kind in most cases.

There is then a contrast between coastal Islam, and Islam inland, and also between areas where Islam is the majority or even only religion, as compared with areas where it is a minority. Put briefly, Islam reached the southern part of the Arabian peninsular, that is Yemen and Hadhramaut, very early, travelling to this region by land. Of the areas in the Indian Ocean that Islam reached by sea, we know that Muslims had arrived on the Swahili coast by the mid eighth century, though at first this was a matter of Muslim traders from the Red Sea and Hadhramaut visiting, and erecting a mosque for their use. Over time some of these Arabs settled, and some of their neighbours in the port cities of this coast converted to Islam. There is evidence of a similar process on the coasts of India occurring rather earlier. Insular southeast Asia came later, and here the religion was spread more by Muslims who themselves were relatively recent converts from India, rather than people from the heartland. Ross Dunn has put the contrast between coastal Islam and that of the heartland very well:

In the Middle East an individual's sense of being part of an international social order varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.

This was reinforced by the coastal location and the fact that most of them were traders, and so had to be aware of distant markets and people and places.48

We will now look at each area, that is East Africa, India, and southeast Asia, in turn. There has been considerable public interest in the date of the first conversions, and the beginnings of an Islamic presence in East Africa. The record shows very clearly that there were trading contacts from the Arab world to East Africa before the beginnings of Islam. For the first century of the Christian era the Periplus mentioned quite extensive contacts between East Africa and Yemen, and also noted that there was extensive intercourse and intermarriage between these Arab traders and the locals. Pre-Islamic ceramics from the Middle East have been found in both Somalia and Mozambique. These are mostly Persian of the Sassanian period.49 As these traders converted, they kept on trading, to East Africa among many other places. The very earliest mosques, dating back perhaps to the mid or even early eighth century, were constructed to service these itinerants, some of whom may even have settled. They were very small, and made of non-durable materials: wood or wattle and daub.

The earliest Muslim accounts of East Africa reflect very clearly that the locals had not converted. The tenth century 'Wonders of India', a collection of Arab stories, describes 'Zanj' as a strange uncouth place, with sorcerers, cannibals, strange birds and fishes.50Al-Biruni, in the early eleventh century, still finds East Africa a wild and largely un-Islamic place.51 It was from the later eleventh century that the locals were converted, and we can talk for the first time of a Swahili civilisation, that is if we follow Middleton and see a defining characteristic of the Swahili being that they are Muslims.52 In this century earlier wooden mosques at Kilwa were enlarged and constructed in stone. By around 1300 the main mosque at Kilwa was some 12 metres by 30 metres, implying a very large Muslim resident population.53 Wright has pointed out that all the larger communities seem to have accepted Islam at roughly the same time, that is primarily in the twelfth century and a few years on either side of this.54

Conversion, even if 'partial', served to further distinguish the shore dwellers, the Swahili, from their inland neighbours. This coastal society, because of its location, was much more open to wider influences from across the Indian Ocean than were people in the interior; their acceptance of Islam is part of this greater exposure. Yet their new religion was heavily impregnated with pre-Islamic indigenous beliefs, as we will see presently.

Arabs had long traded with the Indian coast, and Indians with the Arab world. When the Arabs became Muslims they continued to trade, and conversions in littoral India occurred very early, long before Muslims ruled large areas of the inland subcontinent. An early Portuguese account of the process of conversion stresses that rigid Hindu caste divisions in Malabar led to many conversions among the lowest groups. Correia's account describes both the mix of trade and religion which proved so successful, and the way the Islamic stress on the equality of all believers fostered conversions, producing the indigenous Muslim Mapillah community. He described the dominance of the Nairs in this area, and the degraded position of the lower castes. Muslims, presumably from the Red Sea area given that this was the major trading area for Malabar, pointed out to the (Hindu) rulers that the low caste porters were unable to move about freely in the area, because if they ran into Nairs they would be killed. But if these low caste Malabaris converted to Islam 'they would be able to go freely where they wished, because once they became Muslims they were immediately outside of the law of the Malabaris, and their customs, and they would be able to travel on the roads and mingle with all sorts of people.' This argument, plus a few bribes, convinced the rulers, who gave their consent. The actual conversion of these much-oppressed people was easy, for they could then live where they pleased and eat what they wanted. They also received clothing from the Muslims. The result was a great success for this Muslim conversion drive, which in turn spilt over into trading success, especially in the spice trade to the Red Sea.55

Another very early Portuguese account makes clear that the Mapillahs by no means abandoned all their previous Hindu customs:

And in this land of Malabar there are Moors in great numbers who speak the same tongue as the Heathens of the land, and go naked like the Nayres, but as a token of distinction from the Heathen they wear little round caps on their heads, and long beards. . . . These follow the Heathen custom in many ways; their sons inherit half their property, and their nephews (sisters' sons) take the other half. They belong to the sect of Mafamede, their holy day is Friday. Throughout this land they have a great number of mosques. They marry as many wives as they can support and keep as well many heathen concubines of low caste. If they have sons or daughters by these they make them Moors, and oft-times the mother as well, and thus this evil generation continues to increase in Malabar; the people of the country call them Mapuleres.56

Islam began to make converts in southeast Asia from the late thirteenth century (pride of place is usually given to Samudra in north Sumatra). Conversions en masse happened mostly from the later fourteenth century; in the second half of this century east Java was won over. Islamic states appeared during the fourteenth century, first in north Sumatra and then in coastal Java. From the mid fifteenth century Melaka was the focus of the conversion effort. At the end of our period, in 1500, Islam was well entrenched in coastal central and east Java, the Malay peninsular, the southern Philippines, and Sumatra. Converts to Islam were beginning to be made in Maluku, but in general Indonesia east of Java was still open.57

The important conversion of the ruler of Melaka was briefly described by a Portuguese chronicler in an account which makes clear the merger of trade and religion. 'Some ships arrived at Melaka from the ports of Arabia, and one year there came a caciz to preach the law of Muhammad in these parts.' He was successful in becoming influential with the king, and impressed on him the grandeur of Islam. Conversion followed, and the king was honoured by being given the name of the Prophet himself. A little later in the fifteenth century, just before the arrival of the Portuguese, another chronicle described well the evolving situation in Sumatra, and again demonstrated the close link between trade and religion. The people of the interior were described as brutal, savage, cruel and warlike, and some of them were cannibals. But in the littoral areas people were Muslim. These people had been converted by Muslims who came to the area for commerce. They recorded the size of the area, and the existence of a religious vacuum, and were able to make many conversions because the locals wanted the goods of the foreign Muslims, and also as a result of marriages between foreign Muslims and local girls.

There have been many studies of what is denigrated as deviations from normative Islam. This is a dubious matter indeed. Scholars, often themselves not Muslims but rather western Orientalists, erect a scaffolding of 'pure' Islam, based on the Quran and such claimed fundamentals as the 'Five Pillars' of the faith. Islamic practice is then measured against this ideal yardstick, and deviations are roundly condemned as being un-Islamic or syncretic. Ironically, these rigid interpretations of Islam by westerners have been joined in the last few decades by equally rigid and dogmatic interpretations by Muslim revivalists.

Studies of Islamic practice all around the shores of the ocean provide copious examples. Pouwels claims in a general way that on the Swahili coast up to the seventeenth century Islam was practised in adapted and internalised forms, remaining fundamentally local in outlook.58 Modern scholars of Islam in East Africa have discussed this important matter in a neutral way. They distinguish between dini, religion, and mila, custom. The former is book-based Islamic, while the latter is not.59

Parkin took a more general view and commented that in Muslim communities all around the ocean 'the idea of prayer in the mosque connotes unambiguous Islamic piety, while that outside points towards the possibility of other kinds of worship.'60 Yet this division has often worried exemplars of the faith, who ever since coastal communities accepted Islam have been concerned to 'purify' practice and rectify deviations. These Islamic specialists travelled widely by sea across the ocean, and their activities show unity in the ocean in two ways: first, they themselves made up connecting links, and second, their activities, which continue to today, have slowly increased adherence to a more normative Islam all around the littoral. As we reach more recent times we have more detailed information on their activities, but even for the period covered in this chapter we can see them hard at work.

In our period there was a very wide circulation of religious specialists from the heartland to the littoral peripheries. Push factors several times led to an outflow of men from the Hadhramaut, and also from Oman to the east and Yemen to the west. Sharifs and sayyids, and other knowledgable people, were in great demand all around the shores of the ocean. They had knowledge of the shariah, or especially of the Shafi'i school which was dominant in the Indian Ocean: 'the law was the seal of oceanic unity on which the towns thrived'. They also had baraka, the aura of divine blessing. These sharifian families all traded, but also acted as judges, officials, sufis, and teachers.61 They moved to India after about 1200, and even today the 'Arab' community in Gujarat preserves stories of their Hadhrami origins. The flow to East Africa began after about 1250, and to Malaysia, Indonesia and then the Philippines from 1300. Thus were created far-flung lineages, merchants and scholars mixed together, who had connections for both piety and pelf all over the ocean.

Stephen Dale's exemplary work on the Mapillahs of Malabar provides further detail. He points out that in this area, today called Kerala, Islam is of the Shafi'i madhhab, as compared with the Hanafi school of the Turkic–Persian rulers of the great inland empires. Scholars came to Kerala from Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and Baghdad.62 Barbosa wrote about how many and how diverse they were:

There are many other foreign Moors as well in the town of Calecut, who are called Pardesis, natives of divers lands, Arabs, Persians, Guzarates, Curasanes and Daquanis, who are settled here. As the trade of this country is very large, they gathered here in great numbers with their wives and sons, and seem to have increased.63

From Kerala Islam flowed on, to southeast Asia, especially to the north Sumatran state of Aceh in the sixteenth century, and even to the Philippines. This contact was mediated through the port cities. 'The city in Southeast Asia furnished the crucial link between international Islam and the local Muslim community whose bonds stretched far into the rural interior.'64

These were powerful links indeed. However, we must be careful not to exaggerate the extent to which there was, in this time of still primitive communications, a really dense coming and going. Hadhramis certainly spread widely, but it is unclear how close were the ties they retained with their homeland in southern Arabia. Today they are close, but we cannot assume that this applied in an earlier period. So also we must not exaggerate the degree of commonality achieved at this time. We have copious data on divisions based on ethnicity, political power, and perceived adherence to Islam, from the early modern period, and no doubt these were important earlier also. Ibn Battuta is merely one example of a self-proclaimed expert from the heartland, or near enough, who had a pronounced air of superiority as he mingled with the indigenous Muslims around the ocean. His praise is reserved for those who like himself were Arabs from the heartland, and indeed he always commented on their presence, and praised them, while either ignoring or belittling the locals. Typical was his experience in the Kerala backwaters when he was travelling from Calicut to Quilon. The trip took ten days, and they anchored at night and stayed in villages. It was not a pleasant trip. 'There was no Muslim on board the boat except the man I had hired, and he used to drink wine with the infidels when we went ashore and annoy me with his brawling.' So also with Ibn Jubayr, who left us a long passage of invective against the black Muslims of the west shore of the Red Sea.65

There was another maritime connection which also served to solidify Islam, and create communitas amongst the very diverse community. This is the pilgrimage to Mecca. This was an absolutely central obligation for all Muslims who could afford the voyage. True, Muslims visited many other shrines also, some local and some widely known. As they travelled, Ibn Battuta, Sidi Ali Reis, and Ibn Jubayr all did lots of detours to drop in on holy places: tombs, mosques, madrasas and so on. But the hajj was overwhelmingly important.

When Muslims went to Mecca they were immediately impressed with the power and majesty of Islam. Thousands of pilgrims of very diverse ethnicities, social standing, wealth and age, spent some days engaging in common rituals. Returning hajjis stood out in their local communities as exemplars of the faith, and served to reinforce the work of the religious specialists whom we have just described in that they also strove, back home in their villages, to bring their kin folk closer to the normative Islam they had seen in the Holy Cities. Our data for all this is much more detailed for the early modern period, so we will reserve a full discussion for the next chapter. We do however have accounts of their hajjs from Ibn Battuta, and Ibn Jubayr, though interestingly both of these are more or less normative accounts of how they did the prescribed rituals, and give us very little impression of what it meant for them in a spiritual sense. Ibn Jubayr had a bad time even getting to the Hijaz from the west coast port of 'Aydhab in 1183:

The people of 'Aydhab use the pilgrims most wrongfully. They load the jilab with them until they sit one on top of the other so that they are like chickens crammed in a coop. To this they are prompted by avarice, wanting the hire. The owner of the craft will exact its full cost from the pilgrims for a single journey, caring not what the sea may do with it after that, saying, 'Ours to produce the ships; the pilgrims' to protect their lives.' This is a common saying amongst them.66

We have described several times the close connection between Muslim merchants and religion, trade and the faith, piety and pelf as an English observer once put it. Islam encouraged specific social and commercial attitudes and customs, some parts of Islamic law fitted well with trade, and with travel. We can now turn to mundane and material matters, and investigate the trade of the Indian Ocean in this period. Certainly we will find many Muslims involved, but this is not to be seen as an 'Islamic period', not even in the Arabian Sea, let alone in the eastern ocean and beyond to China.

There is a very extensive literature on the glamorous spice trade. More ink has been spilt on this than it objectively deserves, for it was a small part of the total. Yet it serves well to open a discussion of trade in the Indian Ocean in our period, for it was the prime example of a very long-distance trade. Where did the spices come from? In our period the main production area for pepper was Malabar, which produced perhaps some two-thirds of the Asian total, while other areas were in Siam (now Thailand), the great island of Sumatra and the Sunda Islands. Cinnamon came only from Sri Lanka, growing in a strip 20–50 miles wide and 200 miles long from Chilaw to Walawe on the west coast of the island. Nutmeg and its derivative mace came only from the six small Banda islands. Cloves grew on several small islands along the west coast of the larger Maluku island of Halmahera.67

There were several major nodal points for the spice trade before 1500. Increasingly in the fifteenth century the production of the Maluku islands was taken by local traders to the rising entrepot of Melaka. This was described by the Portuguese Governor Afonso do Albuquerque (1509–15): 'if there were another world, and another navigable route, yet all would resort to the city [of Melaka], for in her they would find every different sort of drugs and spices which can be mentioned in the world. . .'.68

Merchants from all over the Indian Ocean area and even further afield came to Melaka to buy spices and other products. The extensive trade to China was handled by Chinese merchants, and that to the west by a host of traders, many of them Muslims from a wide range of homelands. The dominant group may well have been those from Gujarat. A famous contemporary description, by the apothecary Tomé Pires, claimed that 'Malacca cannot live without Cambay, nor Cambay without Malacca, if they are to be very rich and prosperous.' He also pointed to the route the spices took after Melaka, for he pointed out that 'Cambay [sc. Gujarat] chiefly stretches out two arms, with her right arm she reaches out towards Aden and with the other toward Malacca, as the most important places to sail to'.69 The usual route was for the spices and other products to travel to Calicut, from where they were taken either north to Gujarat and the great markets of northern India, or across the Arabian Sea to the Gulf and the Red Sea, from where they were distributed all over the Middle East and ottoman Turkey. Some of these spices in turn went through Egypt to Alexandria, where Italian merchants, especially Venetians, bought them for sale in Europe.

In the fifteenth century, and later, most Asian spices were consumed by Asians. India alone consumed twice as many fine spices as Europe. Of the total Asian spice production in 1500, Europe took at most one-quarter. China was a huge consumer of pepper, taking around 75 per cent of total southeast Asian production. Marco Polo wrote of Zayton [Quanzhou], which is

frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares.... And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere, destined for Christendom, there come a hundred such, aye and more too, to this haven of Zayton; for it is one of the two greatest havens in the world for commerce.

Later, a little more soberly, he claimed that for one ship that took spices to the west, to Aden and on to Alexandria, ten went north to China.70 Roderich Ptak has done some intriguing estimates for the (admittedly rather minor) clove trade. Around 1500, total production may have been 6,000 bahars, (a bahar is about 210 kg) of which 5,000 went to Melaka, and of this 60–70 per cent was taken to the west by Gujaratis. Europe took about 300 bahars, or a mere 5 per cent of the total.71

Asian trade in spices was a well-integrated one. For example, the great trade centre of Melaka and the great production centres in the Malukus both lived on imported food. Many other products, notably cloths from India, were woven in to the woof and warp of this trade. The profits could be very high, despite taxes in some trans-shipment areas and frequent losses from storm and shipwreck. In the fifteenth century a kilo of pepper cost 1–2 grammes of silver at the production point, 10–14 in Alexandria, 14–18 in Venice, and 20–30 for the European consumer. But costs and taxes were high, so the Venetians, the main European traders, made a profit of only about 40 per cent. There were indeed huge margins: early in the sixteenth century traders made 400 per cent profit taking pepper from Melaka to China. In Calicut mace cost twelve or fifteen times the cost of production in the Banda Islands, and nutmeg thirty times.

There was a range of other high-value products traded over long distances. One example is ambergris, a concretion in the intestine of the sperm whale which is grey at first, and develops a fine smell rather like musk after it changes colour. This rarity was used by the elite in perfumes and incense. Precious stones are another example. In the fifteenth century it was considered that rubies from Ava were better than those from Sri Lanka. Diamonds came from Vijayanagar and Berar. The important production centre of Sri Lanka sent sapphires and emeralds to Calicut. Fine porcelain came from China. Pearls were another luxury trade item. It was considered that pearls from the Gulfs of Mannar and Persia were best. Marco Polo wrote about the former. He reported that the water was only some ten or twelve fathoms deep (about 20 metres), and men dived from small boats to a depth of between 4 and 12 fathoms, and stayed down as long as they could. This diving was done only in the months between the monsoons, that is in March and April. The king took a tax of one-tenth of all finds.72 A century later, in 1330, Ibn Battuta at Bahrain left a description from which it seems that techniques then and in more recent times have changed very little.73

Most of the port cities were more or less monetised by this time, and we have occasional hints of an extensive trade in gold and silver, both coin and silver. This trade changed dramatically once American gold and silver appeared in the second half of the sixteenth century. It has been estimated that around 1500 at least 1,750 kg of gold, equivalent to 20,500 kg of silver, flowed from Europe to the East, this being about one-quarter of total European production.

The major gold producing area around the Indian Ocean was located in Zimbabwe. Production began slowly at the start of the tenth century, or perhaps earlier, and was at its height in the eleventh to fifteenth centuries; it then declined drastically. At first placer mining, that is washing from alluvium, was most common, but later quite sophisticated reef mining techniques were also employed. This gold was exported through Sofala but marketed at Kilwa, up to 10 tons a year before a decline late in the fifteenth century. A well-informed Portuguese claimed in 1506 that when the land was at peace at least one million, and up to 1.3 million maticals of gold were exported each year from Sofala, and maybe 50,000 from Angoche, this then totalling a little under 6,000 kg.74

It may be that another form of currency was equally as important, namely cowry shells. These are a species of marine snail, and while there are several different types the one used as currency in the Indian Ocean and over much of coastal Africa was the 'money cowrie', a 2.5 centimetre yellow species. The best came from the Maldives, as these were smaller than most and so easier to transport. Their value was not affected by their size. At first sight an eccentric choice for a unit of currency, they had several important advantages. They were very durable, and they could not be counterfeited or melted down. They also had an aesthetic appeal which may be lacking in precious metals. They can be beautifully striped, and their Latin name, Cypraea moneta, reveals another aspect of their appeal. The first part of the name comes from 'Cyprus', thought to be the home of Aphrodite, or Venus, the goddess of fertility, and the long, slender orifice of the shell's underside is very like a vagina. Ibn Battuta described how they were produced. The shell fish were harvested from the ocean, and then put in pits until the flesh had dissolved leaving only the shell.

These remote and otherwise quite obscure islands produced a good which was widely traded all over the ocean and beyond to Africa and China. There was an extensive trade in them to Yunnan from the ninth century, some done overland and some by sea via eastern India and southeast Asia, where in both places they were much in demand as currency. Again Ibn Battuta's account is revealing. The inhabitants of the Maldives sold them for the common currency, the dinar, or in exchange for rice from Bengal, or to Yemenites who used them instead of sand for ballast. Later in his travels he found them in Mali and Gao in West Africa.75

The trade in slaves represents another extensive and high-value item of exchange. This trade, using 'product' from East Africa, began in earnest in the eighth and ninth centuries, though Zanj, that is African, slaves are first mentioned in Sassanian Persia, shortly before Islam in the early seventh century. The most important trade was from East Africa to the Abbasid capital of Baghdad from the eighth to the tenth centuries, where they were used to perform backbreaking work draining and controlling the marshes south of Baghdad in the Tigris-Euphrates delta. The trade expanded greatly, until the huge slave revolt of 868–883, which contributed to the decline of the Abbasid empire. However, the trade to the Middle East continued.

Other African slaves were found even further afield. Habshis, that is a corruption of the Arabic Habash, or Ethiopian, were being sent to India at least from the early thirteenth century, while Arab traders brought them to China in Tang and Sung times. Slave trading was widespread in southeast Asia also, though here using local people rather than those from far-away Africa.76

We have been writing about luxury long-distance trade, and indeed this was important, but it was by no means dominant. As one example, much has been made of finds of Chinese porcelain in various Middle East sites in the period from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries. Yet these products from far away are very minor, representing less than 1 per cent of total finds. Nor do these rare finds show that Chinese traders came to the Middle East in any numbers: rather, the porcelain took part in the relay trade from port to port, proceeding by stages and passing through many hands.77

These relay trades were very complex indeed, linking small production and exchange locations with the great port cities. One could study this theme in any area around the ocean, but East Africa can stand as a type case, to give some impression of the complexity of items traded, and of the cosmopolitan trading community in Malindi. The Muslim inhabitants

are great barterers, and deal in cloth, gold, ivory, and divers other wares with the Moors and Heathen of the great kingdom of Cambaya; and to their haven come every year many ships with cargoes of merchandise, from which they get great store of gold, ivory and wax. In this traffic, the Cambay merchants make great profits and thus, on one side and the other, they earn much money. There is great plenty of food in this city, rice, millet, and some wheat which they bring from Cambaya.78

Porcelain, precious stones, spices are the sorts of trade items which have left records or remains behind. However, much more basic things were traded. The two most essential were food and water. In the case of Hurmuz, Ibn Battuta wrote that 'On this island [of Jarun] water is an article of price; it has water-springs and artificial cisterns in which rain-water is collected, at some distance from the city. The inhabitants go there with waterskins, which they fill and carry on their backs to the sea [shore], load them on boats, and bring them to the city.'79 Mozambique similarly had to 'import' its water.

There was a very extensive trade in foodstuffs, especially rice. Several of the great port cities produced almost no food for themselves. Melaka and Hurmuz in the fifteenth century both had very large populations, maybe up to 50,000. It is revealing that in the former there was no land tax, such was the lack of significance of agriculture. All of Melaka's rice came from Pegu, Java and Siam.80 Hurmuz got its necessities from far afield: rice from Chaul and other places, grain from the Punjab via Sind, and grain also from the Persian mainland. Rope, iron and coconuts came from Kerala, wood from East Africa.81 Aceh got supplies from Pegu, Bengal, Arakan and Sumatra. From the great inland state of Vijayanagar rice was exported to the coast, to Sri Lanka and the Gulf. Bengal and Pegu supplied rice to western Indo-China, Sumatra, Sri Lanka and the Maldives. There was even an extensive exchange of new varieties of food crops. African types of millet went to India, and southeast Asian crops like sativa rice and bananas to East Africa. A final necessity item is mangrove poles from East Africa. Mangrove is a very hard, dense wood, heavier than water and termite-resistant. It has always been cut to a standard length of 2.6 metres. It has been used in building in the Red Sea, southern Arabia and the Gulf from the tenth century: the Lamu area and the Rufiji delta were vast lumber yards.82

Some products were traded over very long distances indeed. In the thirteenth century date honey was produced in Bahrain and was much in demand in China by Buddhist pilgrims travelling to India. The great Chinese admiral Zheng He brought back to Beijing several giraffes, including one from Malindi and one from Bengal, the latter having apparently been given to the ruler of Bengal, Saifu'd-Din, by the ruler of Malindi.83 Most extraordinary, and mysterious, was the discovery in 1944 by an Australian radar team of five Islamic copper coins from Kilwa on a beach in the remote Marchinbar Islands, part of the Wessell Islands off Australia's Northern Territory coast. None have dates, but from the inscriptions two may be tenth century, and three early fourteenth. We have no idea how they managed to travel clear across the whole Indian Ocean.84

Long-distance trade was governed by the monsoons. One example was a route from the Gulf region to China around 1000 on the longest voyage sailed by any one ship. The Arab geographers claimed that a passage from Oman to China took about three months and ten days, though one exceptional voyage was completed in 48 days. These sound extraordinarily rapid, but they are only sailing times. Several stops were necessary on the way, partly to trade, and partly to wait for the right monsoon, so that the actual time from leaving the Gulf to reaching Guangzhou (Canton) was at least six months. The dhows sailed down the Gulf before it became too rough, in September or October, and then went on to Malabar on the northeast monsoon, arriving in mid December. They stayed there while they traded, and waited for the cyclone season in the Bay of Bengal to end. In January they sailed to Malaya, and used the last of the northeast monsoon to get around the straits of Melaka and so catch the southern monsoon in the South China Sea and reach Guangzhou in April or May. The return voyage began in October to December when the northeast monsoon took them back to Melaka and over the Bay of Bengal to the west coast of India. The last stage, back to the Gulf, was sailed using the beginning of the southwest monsoon, reaching home around mid year.85

Another example comes from five hundred years later. Very early in the sixteenth century Barbosa left us a compelling description of one of the major long-distance trade routes of this period, that is from Malabar, specifically Calicut, to the Red Sea. He wrote that the Muslim traders in Calicut from the Red Sea and Egypt:

took on board goods for every place, and every monsoon ten or fifteen of these ships sailed for the Red Sea, Aden and Meca, where they sold their goods at a profit, some to the Merchants of Juda, who took them on thence in small vessels to Toro, and from Toro they would go to Cairo, and from Cairo to Alexandria, and thence to Venice, whence they came to our regions. These goods were pepper (great store), ginger, cinnamon, cardamons, myrobalans, tamarinds, canafistula, precious stones of every kind, seed pearls, musk, ambergris, rhubarb, aloes-wood, great store of cotton cloths, porcelains, and some of them took on at Juda copper, quicksilver, vermilion, coral, saffron, coloured velvets, rosewater, knives, coloured camlets, gold, silver, and many other things which they brought back for sale in Calecut. They started in February, and returned from the middle of August up to the middle of October of the same year. In this trade they became extremely wealthy. And on their return voyages they would bring with them other foreign merchants who settled in the city, beginning to build ships and to trade, on which the King received heavy duties.86

These two accounts point to a major change in the structure of long-distance sea trade in our period. Barbosa was describing a trade divided at south India, while the first account sketched a direct passage from the Gulf to China. What happened is that around the eleventh century the trade became segmented, with one merchant and ship doing the Arabian Sea part to south India, where the goods were exchanged, and then taken on by other ships and merchants to southeast Asia, where there was another exchange, and so to China. South India was always a place where there was a halt, and exchange, but the difference is that in the earlier time the same merchant and ship kept going beyond there, while later they did not.

In the earlier period, from say the eighth century, the very long distance trade from the Gulf to China was handled by Persian merchants. In the Gulf Siraf, on the east bank, was the main centre, where were to be found goods from all over the Indian Ocean, including East Africa. Later Julfar, on the west coast up from Hurmuz, was important, and later still Hurmuz. Another old centre was Daybul, in present day Pakistan. Arabs also took part in this trade, and soon became more important than the Persians. Later some Chinese ships also, from the twelfth century and particularly in the fourteenth, traded into the Arabian Sea. However, from around the eleventh century the direct passage from Baghdad to Guangzhou declined, and we see the rise of emporia, that is shorter routes connecting the major port cities of Baghdad, Hurmuz, Cambay, Calicut, Melaka and Guangzhou, with many minor routes from, say, the Bay of Bengal feeding into this network. What evolved then was a basic change in the orientation of long-distance trade, which in the earlier period was on an east–west axis, from Baghdad to Guangzhou, and later was more north–south, that is Baghdad down to India, then an east–west segment to southeast Asia, and then north–south again up to China. We can even see here an early version of today's divide between north and south, for the north, India and China, provided manufactures like cloths and porcelain, and the south unprocessed tropical products such as ivory, slaves, gold and spices.

From the twelfth century or slightly later we have three segments: the Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, and the South China Sea. Chinese and Indians went to Melaka, Persians and Arabs only to India. It is significant that the account by Wang Dayuan, who travelled extensively in the 1330s, finds a western ocean and an eastern one, with the division at the Straits of Singapore.87 This important move towards segmentation may have been a result of traders realising that the direct passage in the same ship was inefficient, given that they had to wait for monsoons at several places, but it was probably also a result of the rise of important Indian trading communities in south India associated with the powerful Cola dynasty. We will turn to the influence of politics on trade presently, but we can remember here that the wealth and stability of the Abbasid empire from 750 CE, and of T'ang China, 618–907, certainly fostered this long-distance and quite perilous trade. The effects of the rise of the Cola empire in South India from the late ninth century has been less investigated, but it may be that the Colas, and the powerful merchant organisations, akin to guilds and associated intricately with state power, had two results. First, the stability provided by this state had the same effect as the equivalent in Baghdad and Guangzhou, that is a wealthy and stable state which had a large demand for foreign luxuries, and second merchants based in this state could trade both east and west, and especially to the east, to southeast Asia, where they met up with the powerful Sumatran-based trading empire of Srivijaya, which benefited from controlling the Melaka Straits up to the thirteenth century. South India seems to act as a fulcrum in this very long-distance connection. Later in our period other Indians joined in, this time Muslims based in the many emporia on the west coast, and in the major Islamic state of Gujarat from the thirteenth century. Increasingly the trade beyond India was controlled by Indian Muslims, while Arabs, and a few Persians, were restricted to the Arabian Sea.

We can start our survey of routes, trade and ports in the east, in China. We have noticed that Chinese products, especially porcelain, were traded all around the Indian Ocean from very early times. We have already quoted Ibn Battuta's valuable description of the ships he saw in Calicut (see pages 70–1). His account dates from the early fourteenth century, but Chinese products have been found in the Arabian Sea from much earlier. Chinese pottery has been found on the Swahili coast from at least the eighth century, and a little later in Mauritius also. These goods were transshipped many times in a relay fashion, and some no doubt came overland to the Gulf and then were sent on by sea. An actual Chinese trading presence seems to date only from the twelfth century.

Many of the vast Chinese ships had both economic and political functions. We refer to the famous tribute system. Ostensibly this was a matter of foreign rulers accepting the superiority of the Chinese emperor, and sending tribute to signify this. However, much of the tribute was actually trade items, and the system then was a method of fostering exchange as much as a matter of political dominance. In the later thirteenth century the new Mongol dynasty, the Yuan, was keen to expand trade. In 1286 either the sons or younger brothers of the rulers of ten kingdoms ranging from Malabar to Sumatra came to pay tribute.88 Marco Polo got part of the way back home accompanying one of these politico-trade missions. Around 1290 a Mongol princess was sent by sea to Persia to become the consort of the local ruler, Arghun Khan, and the Polos went with her. She travelled with 600 sailors and officials, in a fleet of fourteen ships. They left from Zaiton, of which more in a minute, and touched at Champa and the Malay peninsula. Reaching Sumatra, they were forced to wait for five months to avoid monsoon storms. They then travelled near the Nicobar Islands to Sri Lanka, the west coast of India, and so to Hurmuz. However, Arghun had died by this time, and the princess was handed over to his son, Mahmud Ghazan, instead. This sort of voyage has been described in Chinese sources also. They said that it took forty days to get from China to Sumatra. One spent the 'winter' there and then took thirty days to get to the Malabar coast.89 This information again points to the good sense of the rise of the emporia trade, which meant that ships travelled shorter distances and did not have to wait for a change in the monsoon. Rather they could sell their goods and return home.

Kulke claims that in the thirteenth century there was a large Indian settlement, complete with temple, in south China, and Chinese settlements in Cola south India.90 Chinese traded to India, but it seems that many more Indians traded to China. Indeed Polo makes clear that Indian traders had by his time replaced Arabs and were an important community at the main Chinese port, which now seems to be Zaiton, that is modern Quanzhou, rather than Guangzhou (Canton). In a famous passage he wrote that Quanzhou is

frequented by all the ships of India, which bring thither spicery and all other kinds of costly wares. It is the port also that is frequented by all the merchants of Manzi [the surrounding province], for hither is imported the most astonishing quantity of goods and of precious stones and pearls, and from this they are distributed all over Manzi.

Much later, when he got to Malabar, he again wrote, 'Ships come hither from many quarters, but especially from the great province of Manzi. Coarse spices are exported hence both to Manzi and to the west'.91

Quanzhou was located north of the modern port of Amoy, or Xiamen, opposite Taiwan. Muslims had traded there very early on, even from the seventh century, and in 1350 there were six or seven mosques in the town.92 Among the products they imported was rhinocerous horn, which establishes a connection between East Africa and China. Fujian merchants began to venture out only from the late tenth century. Indian merchants had been in Guangzhou by at least the early sixth century.93 From the twelfth century the Kling merchants from south India began to concentrate on Quanzhou, where in the mid fourteenth century they built a large Siva temple modelled on that back home in Madurai. By this time however Chinese traders were taking over the trade between China and Melaka from both Hindus and Muslims. This trade may have been fostered by the awe-inspiring state-directed expeditions of the eunuch Zheng He, to whom we must now turn.

Zheng He erected a tablet which gives a flavour of his pride and sense of superiority. He had inscribed:

We have traversed more than one hundred thousand li of immense waterspaces and have beheld in the ocean huge waves like mountains rising sky high, and we have set eyes on barbarian regions far away hidden in a blue transparency of light vapours, while our sails, loftily unfurled like clouds day and night, continued their course [as rapidly as] a star, traversing those savage waves as if we were treading a public thoroughfare....

This chauvinism is reflected even more in another inscription, where he claims that during his voyages 'those among the foreigners who were resisting the transforming influence of Chinese culture and were disrespectful, we captured alive, and brigands who indulged in violence and plunder, we exterminated. Consequently the sea-route was purified and tranquillised and the natives were enabled to pursue their avocations.'94 So also with many modern authors: Mills claims in his introduction to Ma Huan's account of Zheng He's 1433 expedition that the representatives of sixty-seven foreign states, including seven kings, came to China to pay tribute and render homage. At this time, at the height of Ming power in the 1420s, Yong Le's fleet had 400 warships of the fleet, 2,700 coastal warships, 400 armed transports, and the pride of the Ming fleet, 250 treasure ships, each carrying 500 men. Throwing caution to the wind, Mills enthusiastically claims that 'China enjoyed a hegemony over a vast arc of land which extended from Japan to the east coast of Africa.'95

Comparisons have often been made with Portuguese activities at the same time in the early fifteenth century. When the Chinese were travelling all over the Indian Ocean, say in 1422, the Portuguese had not even got to Cape Bojador, 26° N. Zheng He's greatest ships were 400 feet long, while Vasco da Gama's were between 85 and 100 feet. Many senior historians have speculated that Zheng He's fleets had the ability to round the Cape of Good Hope (indeed maybe they did) and proceed north to discover western Europe. World history would have been stood on its head.

The reality is a little less exciting than this. There were a total of six expeditions between 1403 and 1433, sponsored by the Yong Le emperor of the Ming dynasty. These vast fleets travelled all around the littoral of the Indian Ocean, going as far as Jiddah, and far down the Swahili coast. Each had between 100 and 200 ships, and forty to sixty of these were the famed huge treasure ships, which could be 150 metres long. There were maybe 27,000 men in each fleet. However, most of the ships were much smaller, some for example being water carriers. Barker tentatively claims that even the size of the great treasure ships has been enthusiastically overestimated: they may have been only about 230 feet long (though this is still very large for the time).96 They are to be seen as a continuation of the tribute system, with its characteristic mixture of tribute and trade. However, the fleets also engaged in essentially pedling trade in the Indian Ocean, that is, they took goods from one place to another quite apart from any association with tribute. They took southeast Asian sandalwood and Indian pepper to Aden and Dhofar, Indian pepper to Hurmuz, sandalwood and rice to Mogadishu, and rice, probably from Bengal, to the Maldives.97

Perhaps the most important point is that Zheng He (perhaps understandably) has bewitched historians, and led to their ignoring three important matters that place his voyages in context. First, his activities were really a continuation of a long tradition, albeit writ large. Second, the tribute system, so-called, hardly meant Chinese suzerainty all over the Indian Ocean. Third, for much of the time the expeditions engaged in humble Indian Ocean trade alongside many other merchants. We described Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo travelling in private, and very large, Chinese ships, and generally Chinese merchants, often ignoring official prohibitions on overseas trade, dominated the trade from their coast to southeast Asia, and at least up to the middle of the fifteenth century, well after the end of major state expeditions, participated fully in trade from Melaka to the west coast of India but not beyond.

Overall then Chinese merchants, and state expeditions, played a rather small and transient role in the Indian Ocean proper. We can now turn to a discussion of ports, routes and traders in the Indian Ocean up to about 1500.

There are several ways to categorise ports around the Indian Ocean at this time. Some owed much to geography, either because they were located on choke points, or because they had productive hinterlands. Some were pure exchange centres, others had some industry of their own. Some were subordinate to a larger inland state, while others were port city states, or perhaps, to borrow the southeast Asian term, port polities. We noticed earlier that port cities have connections with the near interior, that is the umland, with their hinterland, and with their foreland, that is the areas of the overseas world with which the port is linked through shipping, trade and passenger traffic. It is this characteristic which means that port cities by definition are cosmopolitan, much more so than the inland. The visitors are very different from inland peasant populations. These are

some of the most enterprising and dynamic individuals, people whose horizons have been broadened by time and exposure, whose skins wear the deep hue of the 'tanning of travel.' They bring awareness of an enlarged macrocosm to their host community, transfusing resident populations with new ideas in the give of foreign expertise and the take of local hospitality.98

Where were the major port cities in the Indian Ocean area in our period? We should start in East Africa. In the far south, Sofala provided gold and ivory from the far interior. The gold was mined or washed in the inland Mutapa state in present day Zimbabwe and brought to the coast to be exchanged for cloth and other manufactures from India and the Middle East. To the north, Kilwa was the great emporium on the coast between roughly 1250 and 1330, from which time date a great mosque and palace, the latter being the largest roofed stone building south of the Sahara until modern times. By 1500 the greatest port city was Mombasa, an important centre of exchange of ivory and gold from the south for manufactures from the west and north. Malindi was a smaller centre at this time, but Mogadishu benefited from its proximity to the Red Sea and Hadhramaut to be another important port. All of these ports on the Swahili coast were autonomous politically, and indeed engaged in much competition and even conflict with each other. The only substantial interior state at this time was the Mutapa empire, and its sway ended far from the coast. None of them were important centres of production: rather they acted as outlets for export goods from the interior, gold and ivory especially. Consequently connections with the interior were of crucial importance. Yet here and elsewhere the major products traded were humble bulk goods carried along the coast in a myriad of small dhows: mangrove poles, cheap cloth, food, even water.

Moving along the coast, Aden was usually a great port city because of its location at the entrance to the Red Sea. It was also very much an exchange centre or echelle, for it was almost an island, cut off as it is from the inland by the mountains which surround it. It had no hinterland. There were several ports within the Red Sea, but the greatest certainly was Jiddah. It had been a major port for many centuries, occasionally helped by government policy. In 1429 the Mamluk sultan even decreed that spices from the east could only be sold in Jiddah, and only to his agents.99 In that century the port was known to the Arabs as the 'Bride of the Red Sea'.100 Portuguese accounts of trade before their arrival make clear Jiddah's central role. Barros wrote that it was the major focus of the spice trade, saying that Jiddah, with its buildings, trade and commerce, and because almost all the ships that come from India call at it, 'is the most celebrated and noble settlement of all this Arabian coast inside the entrance', and added that 'most of the residents of that city [Jiddah] were merchants, because of the merchandise that flowed through it, both entering and leaving'.101 Elsewhere he described how the goods came down from Cairo, and the ships called at Jiddah. From there the goods went off to the Arabian Sea directly, not calling at Aden, with their times of sailing determined by the monsoons. They left the Red Sea 'in the months of navigation, when the westerlies prevail', and came back with the easterlies.102

The situation in the Gulf varied over time. At the beginning of our period, when the Abbasid empire was flourishing, the largest ships could not reach Basra, let alone Baghdad, because the estuary and the delta of the Tigris-Euphrates were very difficult to navigate. For a brief time, the first half of the tenth century, Sohar was an important port, with contacts up the Gulf and across to Africa. After it was sacked by the Buyids from Oman it was replaced by Siraf, on the east coast of the Gulf south of Shiraz, where large boats were unloaded and their goods taken in smaller ships to the great cities further north. Going south, ships went from Siraf to Muscat and Sohar, then either to Daybul or ports in Malabar, then around Sri Lanka to Melaka, up to Hanoi, and then to Guangzhou. Typically, this trade was at first handled in its entirety by Muslim traders, some Persians but increasingly Arabs, and from about 1000 became more segmented, with Chinese coming some of the way, and Indians also involved as goods were trans-shipped and sold on at one or other of these great echelles.103 The other great port in the Gulf in late Abbasid times, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, was Qeys, Qais or Kish, on a small island down the Gulf from Siraf. Here Indians brought in spices, people from Yemen, Iraq and Fars provided silks and cloths, wheat, barley and millet. There was also a large slave trade, and ivory, gold, wood, skins and ambergris from East Africa. Horses were sent out to the Deccan. Pearls were another export from this major port, while there have been many finds of Chinese ceramics.

Hurmuz, located on the choke point at the entrance to the Gulf, was always an important exchange centre, but rose to greater prominence in the fifteenth century. Most of these great marts were independent of any exterior political authority at this time. They acted as major centres for the exchange of Middle Eastern and even European goods for products from all over the Indian Ocean area. Located on barren foreshores, and deficient even in water, let alone food, most had no major productive role, nor extensive hinterland. Rather they were hinges linking areas to the north with those to the south and east.

As we move southeast from the Gulf we begin to find variations on this pattern. Ports in the area around the Indus delta, the first part of South Asia to be conquered and converted to Islam, drew on a large and quite productive hinterland. Daybul, or Bambhore, at the mouth of the Indus, was a very old emporium which declined from the eleventh century as a result of silting. It was replaced by Lahari Bandar, but then there was also a major port at Thatta from the fifteenth century, located no less than 200 kms up the river from the coast.

The great ports of Gujarat were certainly important centres of exchange, but they were located on the maritime fringe of important production centres for such products as indigo, saltpetre, and especially a vast variety of cotton cloths. Indeed, some of the manufacturing process was done in these very port cities. In our period the greatest port was Cambay, at the head of the Gulf of Cambay. This, like many other ports within and around the gulf, was not an independent city state: rather it was part of the important Muslim sultanate of Gujarat. Here were huge volumes of trade, skilful merchants, and a very well articulated network of production and exchange and credit. For such ports, that is those with productive interiors, connections with the land were obviously crucial, as compared with say Aden and Hurmuz, which being dependent on the exchange of products from all over the Indian Ocean, but not from their interiors, were less concerned about what happened directly inland from them.

The ports further down India's west coast were less important, in part because the interior was less productive. The next major group of port cities were in Malabar, now the Indian state of Kerala. The dominant port here was Calicut, ruled by a powerful and independent ruler, the Samudri raja or Zamorin, and a market not only for a host of 'foreign' goods but also a great collection and distribution centre for the pepper which was harvested in abundance in the interior. Several other port polities were important at different times in this region. One of them was Cranganore, some 15 miles landwards from the seashore and located on several rivers. A vast array of merchants there dealt in spices.104 None of these Malabar ports were centres for manufacturing, yet neither were they merely exchange centres. In these cases location (they made obvious stopping places for trade from west to east and back again) joined with an interior where much pepper was found to ensure that for many centuries there would be major ports in this region.

This also applies quite exactly to Sri Lanka, and its major port of Colombo, for its location paralleled that of the Malabar ports, while the island was the only place where true, fine, cinnamon was produced. Moving around to the Bay of Bengal, toward the end of our period the major ports included, on the Coromandel coast, Pulicat, which drew on production, especially textiles, from the great Hindu kingdom of Vijayanagar, but was little affected politically by it. In Bengal the most important port was Chittagong, which similarly was little controlled from the political centre of Gaur. The last major port of which we need to take account was Melaka, located along the coast from modern Singapore, which rose to prominence in the fifteenth century both as a great trade centre, maybe the greatest of all in the second half of this century, and also as a dissemination centre for Islam. In this great mart were found products from all over the Indian Ocean and far beyond: Chinese silks and porcelains, Indonesian spices, textiles from India, and a host of European products also. Melaka functioned as a pure exchange centre. Local products, let alone local manufactures, were of very slight account. It was the great hinge in Indian Ocean trade at this time, connecting up what could be called the 'larger' Indian Ocean, which would include the South China Sea on one side, and the Mediterranean on the other.

We now move on to consider the merchants who made these ports what they were. A merchant is a person who exchanges one good for another, or buys a good for money with the intention of selling it on to someone else. It would be tedious and pointless merely to list a confusing array of merchants in each port city. Rather, I will concentrate on the main communities, and attempt to describe the role of merchant communities in general rather than in specific terms. Some merchants were permanently located in a particular market place, though the goods they dealt with could come from far away. Others travelled widely, chaffering their way all around the shores of the Indian Ocean.

In our discussion of merchants we can use, with care, evidence from the very early Europeans at the start of the sixteenth century. These men were concerned to understand how things worked in the Indian Ocean the better to participate, or even control, and so they left valuable accounts of what they found around 1500. Certainly they were impressed with the merchants they met in Gujarat. As a merchant from Florence commented in western India in 1510,

We believe ourselves to be the most astute men that one can encounter, and the people here surpass us in everything. And there are Muslim merchants worth 400,000 to 500,000 ducats. And they can do better calculations by memory than we can do with the pen. And they mock us, and it seems to me that they are superior to us in countless things, save with sword in hand, which they cannot resist.105

A famous early Portuguese observer, Tomé Pires, at about the same time said that

They are men who understand merchandise; they are so properly steeped in the sound and harmony of it, that the Gujaratees say that any offence connected with merchandise is pardonable. Those of our people who want to be clerks or factors ought to go [to Gujarat] and learn, because the business of trade is a science in itself which does not hinder any other noble exercise, but helps a great deal.106

We are often told that the trade of the Indian Ocean in our period was increasingly handled by Muslims: the ocean was a 'Muslim lake'. And to be sure there is much truth in this. Nor is this a matter for wonder, for Islam had spread from the heartland of the Red Sea all around the Indian Ocean over water. One would predict then that coastal people were most likely to be converted first, and indeed this was the case. However, there was an important change during our period, for while earlier it was Muslim Arabs from the Red Sea and Egypt who dominated Indian Ocean trade and its markets except perhaps for Calicut, later it was local converts from such coastal areas as Gujarat and Bengal, and Middle Eastern Muslims who often had migrated to the Indian Ocean area, who had the cream of the trade, especially that going past India to the Bay of Bengal and beyond.

A brief tour around the markets which we have just listed will make this clearer. On the East African coast the coastal trade was done by local people, the Swahili, who had been converted to Islam in the twelfth century. These men also acted as brokers, connecting the interior with overseas markets. They seem to have been in a particularly, and atypically, advantageous situation. Over most of the Indian Ocean and its interior use values were relatively constant, so that a preciosity would be valued much the same wherever one was. However, this was not the case in the African interior. Gold and ivory were produced there, but these items had little value in their originating societies; cloth and glass beads did. The situation was reversed in the overseas areas of India and the Middle East. This happy situation gave the Swahili brokers who made the connection between these two different use value areas a great advantage, and they profited from it, as the wealth of Kilwa at its height in the fourteenth century makes clear.107Much of the overseas long-distance trade was handled by Muslims from the Hadhramaut and Yemen, and they were important people in the Swahili port cities; indeed many of the rulers were descended from, or married to, merchants from further north. However, there was also a sizeable Hindu presence, men from Gujarat who came in with the seasons and, unlike the Muslims, did not settle.

Hindus were also to be found, this time often settled, in the great market of Aden, and indeed further into the Red Sea, but obviously this area was dominated by Muslims, in this case Arabs. Yet earlier in our period Jewish Karimi merchants played a major role in the Egyptian Mamluk state and the Mediterranean in general. Around 1100, as Goitein has shown, they were major participants in Indian Ocean trade. So also in the Gulf, where in the tenth century in the briefly important port of Sohar there was a large Jewish community. However, the main traders here were Ibadi Muslims from Oman, who ventured to ports all around the Arabian Sea.108 At its height Siraf had some fabulously wealthy merchants. In the early twelfth century Abul Qasim Ramisht, who traded as far as China, was very wealthy. The silver plate his family ate out of reputedly weighed about one ton.109 Later in our period in the Gulf, Hurmuz was one of the great cosmopolitan cities with a great variety of traders: some Europeans and Hindus, Muslims from various areas, but the majority of them local, that is Persians. In Gujarat the interior trade, and the domestic markets, were largely controlled by Hindus and Jains, and they also engaged in oceanic trade to an extent. However, more important were a bewildering variety of Muslims: local people, Persians, still some Arabs, others from Bengal. Both here and in Calicut it seems that the long-distance trade was handled mostly by 'foreign' Muslims, who were able to draw on far-flung family connections, while local converts were more likely to engage in coastal and inland trade. Around the corner, on the Coromandel coast, we find a larger role for Hindu traders, especially klings, who were south Indian Hindus more correctly called Marakkayars. Some members of the community had converted to Islam, and were known as chulias.110 Bengal, however, had an important Persian merchant community. Melaka, as the greatest market, had the greatest variety of merchants: all sorts of Muslims, and Hindus from both Coromandel and Gujarat, plus local people from the Malay world, most of them now Muslim, and of course Chinese traders.

What was the position of these merchant communities in these great markets? Ibn Battuta again will provide an entrée to the topic. He left several detailed accounts which show the typical situation. In 1330 he arrived at Mogadishu:

It is the custom of the people of this town that, when a vessel reaches the anchorage, the sumbuqs, which are small boats, come out to it. In each sumbuq there are a number of young men of the town, each one of whom brings a covered platter containing food and presents it to one of the merchants on the ship, saying 'This is my guest,' and each of the others does the same. The merchant, on disembarking, goes only to the house of his host among the young men, except those who have made frequent journeys to the town and have gained some acquaintance with its inhabitants; these lodge where they please. When he takes up residence with his host, the latter sells his goods for him and buys for him; and if anyone buys anything from him at too low a price or sells to him in the absence of his host, that sale is held invalid by them. This practice is a profitable one for them.111

A little later he arrived in Zafari, that is Khafar or Dofar, in southwest Oman:

The population of Zafari are engaged in trading, and have no livelihood except from this. It is their custom that when a vessel arrives from India or elsewhere, the sultan's slaves go down to the shore, and come out to the ship in a sumbuq, carrying with them a complete set of robes for the owner of the vessel or his agent, and also for the rubban, who is the captain, and for the kirai who is the ship's writer. Three horses are brought for them, on which they mount [and proceed] with drums and trumpets playing before them from the seashore to the sultan's residence, where they make their salutations to the vizier and amir jandar. Hospitality is supplied to all who are in the vessel for three nights, and when the three nights are up they eat in the sultan's residence. These people do this in order to gain the goodwill of the shipowners....112

And finally some years later in the Maldives:

It is a custom of theirs when a vessel arrives at their island that kanadir, that is to say small boats, go out to meet them, loaded with people from the island carrying betel and karanbah, that is green coconuts. Each man of them gives these to anyone whom he chooses on board the vessel, and that person becomes his guest and carries his goods to his host's house as though he were one of his relatives. Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.113

Ibn Battuta's experiences were the norm. In Quilon in the twelfth century a European visitor, Benjamin of Tudela, said that when foreign merchants arrived three secretaries of the king came on board, wrote down their names, and reported them to the king. The king then gave them security for their property, which he claimed could even be left in open fields without guard.114 Marco Polo wrote generally, and perhaps over-flatteringly, that Indian merchants

are the best merchants in the world, and the most truthful, for they would not tell a lie for anything on earth. If a foreign merchant does not know the ways of the country he applies to them and entrusts his goods to them, they will take charge of these, and sell them in the most loyal manner, seeking zealously the profit of the foreigner and asking no commission except what he pleases to bestow.115

We also have an account demonstrating practice in the great Gujarati port of Cambay in the sixteenth century. While this is beyond the period of this chapter, Cambay was little affected by the policies of the Portuguese. The Frenchman Vincent Le Blanc was in Cambay in the mid 1570s. He wrote:

Trade is very faithfully carried on there [in Cambay] for the Factors and Retailers are persons of quality, and good reputation; and are as careful in venting and preserving other persons wares, as if they were their own proper goods; they are also obliged to furnish the Merchants with dwelling houses, and warehouses, diet, and oftentimes with divers sorts of commodities: the houses are large and pleasant, where you are provided with women of all ages for your use, you buy them at certain rates, and sell them again when you have made use of them, if you like them not you may choose the wholsomest and the most agreeable to your humour: all things necessary to livelihood may be made your own at cheap rates, and you live there with much liberty, without great inconveniences; if you discharge the customs rates upon merchandizes, nothing more is exacted, and all strangers live with the same freedom and liberty as the Natives do, making open profession of their own Religions.116

It could be that the allocation of a local to act as agent led to some fleecing of the ignorant arriviste. Tomé Pires described how in Melaka, before the Portuguese conquest, when a ship came in the captain or leading merchant negotiated a price with a group of ten or twenty local merchants, and they then divided the goods up among themselves. This did mean that sales were quick, an important consideration given the monsoon system.117 So also in Calicut, again at the end of our period. When the foreign Muslim traders, the pardesi, arrived, 'As soon as any of these Merchants reached the city, the King assigned him a Nayre, to protect and serve him, and a Chatim clerk to keep his accounts and look after his affairs, and a broker to arrange for him to obtain such goods as he had need of, for which three persons they paid good salaries every month.'118 This account is confirmed by Ma Huan, from Zheng He's fleet, and his account seems to show a very considerable degree of state control or facilitation: the two seem to merge in rather. He wrote that in Calicut pepper was held in a state storeroom, and sold at a fixed price, but one had to have an official's permission. When a ship arrived an official and the people on board negotiated fixed prices for the goods it carried, and also for what the people on ship wanted to buy from the locals. These prices had to be observed, with no deviation. 'Foreign ships from every place come there; and the king of the country also sends a chief and a writer and others to watch the sales; thereupon they collect the duty and pay it in to the authorities.'119

Two earlier examples again point to a rather benevolent situation, where merchants were able to counter attempts to fleece them from land powers, and port controllers. A Jewish merchant who left Oman poor, but made a great fortune, came back thirty years later in 912 to Sohar with a huge cargo of Chinese merchandise. Envious people persuaded the Caliph in Baghdad to confiscate his goods, but the governor of Oman was worried about this as he knew that he would lose trade in his port if word of this got out. He summoned all the heads of the merchant communities, and told them what had happened. They closed down the markets, and sent a petition to the Caliph, and the governor was able to avoid having the Jewish merchant arrested. Buzurg recounts a very similar tale, one perhaps based on this actual event. He tells how a rich Jewish merchant in Oman was unjustly arrested by the rulers. This was seen as prejudicial to all merchants and foreigners, and once word of his arrest got around no ships would come to Oman. The markets all closed and foreign merchants got ready to leave. Upset, the locals pointed out that 'We shall be deprived of our living when ships no longer come here, because Oman is a town where men get everything from the sea.'120

In sum, there is very little evidence of the use of force in the Indian Ocean before 1498. The bottom line is competition. None of these port cities could afford to be too abusive, for then merchants would go elsewhere. The crucial point is that these Asian port cities prospered not by compulsion, but by providing facilities for trade freely undertaken by a vast array of merchants. What the rulers provided was really opportunities, fair treatment, an infrastructure within which trade could take place. They ensured low and relatively equitable customs duties, and a certain law and order, but did little else. Officials concerned with trade were instructed to encourage and welcome visitors. In short, visiting merchants wanted a level playing field. If they did not get this, they could retaliate by going elsewhere.

What was the basis of these merchant communities? The main distinction between various natios (a word deriving from the Mediterranean, which can be used to refer to Indian Ocean merchant communities) was not power or wealth, and certainly, in this pre-modern and pre-national age, it was not nationality: these people did not carry passports, and knew little or nothing of frontiers between sovereign states. The senior historian Philip Curtin some time ago wrote a book about 'trade diasporas', which he thought characterised much premodern trade. The notion is that various traders spread out from some place of origin, like say Jews, or Armenians.121 However, his stress on their being dispersed, and on the importance of kin and connections, seems to be to a degree invalid; all merchants at this time operated through these sorts of connections, regardless of whether they were an Armenian trading in Tibet or a Gujarati Jain trading in Cambay. Indeed, the whole concept of a diaspora seems problematic, for many of the groups he classifies in this way did retain strong ties with some base or home area; this certainly applied to India's Hindu and Muslim overseas traders, and even to Armenians, who had no country but did have centres, notably New Julfa in Isfahan.122

If these merchant communities were not all trade diasporas, on what criteria were they based? Obviously not all merchants were itinerant. Rather, various merchant groups had agents, often kin, located in the major trading centres. There were at least two reasons for this. First, someone based in an echelle for some time would learn the local languages and customs, and provide good information for his visiting kin folk. Some port controllers, as we saw, provided mediators for visitors, but in many cases merchants preferred to use their own locally based men. Second, the monsoon pattern necessitated a local permanent contact. A merchant who arrived and was dependent on leaving on the next monsoon would be at a massive disadvantage, as the locals would merely put up their prices and he would have no bargaining power as he would have to leave at a set time in order to catch the monsoon to get home. But someone there permanently could buy when the market was low, and sell when it was high, throughout the year.

Merchant networks could be very extensive indeed, stretching all around Eurasia. From the early fifteenth century the Venetians, who dominated the trade in spices in the Mediterranean, had networks of correspondents and associated merchants' firms going from Venice to Aleppo, Baghdad, Basra, Hurmuz, Diu and Tabriz, and probably to Mashad and Samarkand as well. The aim, successfully realised, was to get information on planned movements of goods. The Armenians had similar networks, spreading from Amsterdam to Moscow and from Istanbul to Cochin and Abyssinia.123

Some of these were kin based networks, in which family ties and a common religion intersected. Armenians practised a particular form of Christianity. Jews had their own faith. Larger trading groups were internally divided: Hindus most obviously by caste, as were Jains. But the best information we have on these religious divisions relates, fortuitously, to the major dispersed trading communities in the Indian Ocean, that is Muslims. As we commented extensively earlier in this chapter, merchants and religious specialists worked hand-in-hand in our period, indeed could be the same person, in that a trader could well adhere to a particular Sufi (Muslim devotional) order, and a religious specialist would trade on his own behalf. In the fifteenth century we know of a group who came from a town in Iran called Kazarun, whose community solidarity was based on locality as well as common religious practice. These merchants were all adherents of a Muslim saint of this town, and his successors sold 'spiritual insurance', in that the merchants would get a blessing and in return, once back from a successful voyage, they would pay a sum of money. This particular network had people in Cambay, Calicut, Quilon, and Guangzhou in China.

Yet we must not let a communal flavour come in to our discussion. There is clear evidence that in Gujarat Hindus and Muslims interacted economically, with for example Muslim traders being happy to use Hindu brokers to secure their goods. Similarly, Jews traded with Armenians, and so on. Indeed it could be, reverting to our discussion of littoral society (see pages 37–41), that all those who travelled and traded by sea had a certain commonality which gave them some identity with those who also did this, as compared with those of their own religion who did not. A Muslim sea trader may have felt more at home with a Jewish sea trader than with a Muslim peasant, or for that matter a mullah, located far inland. The physical aspect of the sea, and the port – the ship, the prostitutes and taverns, the role of the monsoon, haggling over customs – made up an experience which differentiated sea travellers from all others.124

These merchant groupings acted relatively autonomously within the port polities. In Melaka at the time of the Portuguese conquest in 1511 four merchant communities were important, each of them living autonomous lives with their own headmen, called shahbandars, and governing themselves with little or no reference to the ruler, the sultan. The most important of these four groups were the Gujaratis. Many were resident, but some 1,000 merchants from Gujarat visited each year. The other main groups were other merchants from the west, that is from India and especially Klings from Coromandel, Malays from Indonesia and as far east as the Spice Islands and the Philippines, and the East Asians, mostly from South China but also from Japan and Okinawa. They lived in ethnically based quarters, here called kampongs, and each group was represented before the 'state' by a shahbandar. The sultan participated vigorously in trade, but apparently gave himself no particular advantage from his position as ruler.125 Similarly, in the great Gujarati ports different merchant communities had recognised leaders, though their power here, being located not in an independent port city but in a city which was part of a major landed state, must have been less. In Calicut there was a clear distinction, and considerable autonomy, for Gujarati Hindu merchants, foreign Muslims from various places of origin (the most important being those from the Red Sea and Cairo, known as pardesi), and local Muslims, known as Mapillahs. 'They sail everywhere with goods of many kinds and have in the town itself a Moorish Governor of their own who rules and punishes them without interference from the King, save that the Governor gives an account of certain matters to the King.'126

Most political elites used intermediaries to handle their trade, rather than engage themselves in haggling and bargaining. In Gujarat Muslim governors and rulers often used Hindu and Jain intermediaries to handle their private trade. In southeast Asia port city rulers traded vigorously, and indeed sometimes may have taken advantage of their power position. Increasingly, however, they used a quasi official called the saudagar raja, typically a south Indian Muslim or chulia who was the local ruler's official business agent. These people acted as brokers or mediators between the economy and the court.127 The point to note here is that it is one thing for a ruler or a noble to trade, whether directly or through an intermediary, but it is quite another matter to pursue mercantalist policies by which the state as a state aims to control and direct trade.128

It is true however that this varied from port to port. The situation in the Malay world appears to be rather different. Here there were no vast territorial empires, but rather a host of smaller polities. All of these were more or less dependent on maritime trade. This area was much more maritime, more imbricated in the ocean, than were the other areas we have discussed. It is revealing to note that, unlike most other parts of the ocean, especially China and India, all great southeast Asian cities were either ports or were on navigable rivers. For the latter, we can instance Pegu, Ava, Phonpenh, Ayutthaya, and for the former Pasai, Melaka, Aceh, Palembang, Patani, Brunei, Manila, Makassar, Banten, Demak, Grisek/Surabaya.

This seems to have meant that the rulers of these port polities played a much larger role in sea trade than was the case elsewhere, for trade was more central both for them and for the usually rather limited inland areas behind them. In this insular world the inland was closely connected to the coast, and trade patterns in the ocean affected even basically inland states like Burma and Thailand, let alone the smaller coastal states in Indonesia such as Aceh, Perak, Kedah, and Johore.129

What examples do we have of state intervention? They are actually few and far between in southeast Asia. An extreme example was Srivijaya, a Sumatran thalassocracy, which controlled the Straits of Melaka from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. More generally, Arun Das Gupta gives a picture of heavy state involvement: ports were dominated by sultans, coastal trade was under their control, and so was spice production, which was done by slaves.130 It may be that coercion increased once the Portuguese, with their attempts at monopoly, arrived. The ruler of Aceh began to control pepper production, and even wiped out cultivation in some areas in order to deny pepper to the Europeans.131 The best summing up for the southeast Asian case may be that there certainly was more intervention in trade from states than was the case in the rest of the Indian Ocean, and this was fundamentally a consequence of the geography of the area. Yet this is a relative matter. Obviously no Indian Ocean state or port polity got near the sort of economic control which any modern state routinely exercises.

I will end this long account of ports, products and merchants with a handful of more personal and individual accounts of actual travellers. Many of these men are petty traders or, in F.C. Lane's felicitous phrase, the sea proletariat. They travelled mostly short distances – up and down the coasts, or on the inland waterways, the backwaters of the Kerala near interior or in the marsh area of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. They visited many strange places well outside the interest of the established great merchants. The fictitious but still arguably prototypical Sindbad the Sailor visited one place, probably the remote Andaman Islands, and found that the inhabitants rode their horses bareback. He got a saddle made, and they were all delighted and gave him many presents.132

Yet again we must not categorise too strictly. Pedlars sometimes could be so lucky as to acquire a valuable item, and there is no reason to assume merchant princes found it beneath their dignity to trade in necessities. Sindbad seems to be a typical Indian Ocean trader. He purportedly lived in Baghdad during the golden reign of Harun al Rashid, when the city was at its most splendid. On his first voyage, 'From Basrah we sailed, day after day, night after night, over the sea, visiting island after island and land after land, selling and bartering our goods at each.' So also on the second, when they went 'visiting from island to island and ocean to ocean for many weeks, making ourselves known to the notables and chief merchants at each port of call, and both selling and exchanging our goods to great advantage.' And again on his fifth voyage, when after his celebrated escape from the Old Man of the Sea he traded in coconuts, and with them bought pepper and cinnamon, and made so much from them that he was able to hire divers once he got to the sea of pearls. He made 'an immense fortune'. Then he bought aloe wood, and went back home to Basra.133

Ghosh's brilliant study of an 'antique land' describes other people who travelled huge distances. In Aden in the 1120s there were at least two Jewish merchants who 'bear witness to a pattern of movement so fluent and far-ranging that they make the journeys of later medieval travellers, such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, seem unremarkable in comparison.' One was the prominent Jew Abu Sa'id Halfon of Fustat, that is Cairo, who now lived in Aden. He travelled between Egypt, India, East Africa, Syria, Morocco and Spain. The other was Abu Zikri Sijilmasi, from Morocco, who travelled to Egypt, Aden, southern Europe, and India.134

So also a merchant in Qais, or Qeys, in the thirteenth century. He had 150 camel loads of wares and 40 slaves and servants. He said that he wished 'to carry Persian saffron to China where I understand that it has a high price, and then take the dishes from China to Greece, Greek brocade to India, Indian steel to Aleppo, glass of Aleppo to Yemen, and the striped material of Yemen to Persia.'135 We also know of a merchant around 1300 who was born in Aleppo, then moved to Baghdad, Hurmuz and India, then China, and entered and left China five times. He finished up in India, then returned to Aden, where he was fleeced by the ruler, and so went to Egypt.136

Goitein's heroic work on the Geniza documents provides more detailed and evocative data about Jewish merchants. One merchant travelled widely, both on his own account, and as an agent for others. This particular merchant hailed from Tripoli, but lived in Cairo. At the end of the eleventh century he planned a trip via the Red Sea to India, with his own goods and on account those of others. First he left Cairo and went to Tunisia to get coral to take to India. Then he came back to Cairo, went down the Red Sea, and finally reached Anhilvarah, north of modern Bombay, where he spent over a year doing business for himself, and his Tunisian, Egyptian, and Aden customers. Alas, he was shipwrecked on way back, so this was a very unsuccessful trip.137

In a major reconstruction, Goitein writes of Allan, the nephew of a major Jewish trader of the early twelfth century who had migrated from Al Mahdiyya, now in Tunisia, to Cairo. Allan, the nephew, went to Aden, but the markets were flat, so he sold some goods and decided to take others on to India. He finally got to a city in Malabar, 'but riots and bloodshed occurred, and whoever was in the town fled.' He and his companions loaded their cargo of iron and textiles during the night and fled to Fakaner, also in Malabar, and from there to Quilon, or Kulam, in the extreme south. From there they set off for Aden, but the captain was already ill. After ten days they ran into difficulties off the northern Laccadives. Then 'the captain had a stroke and died. We threw his body overboard into the sea. So the boat remained without a commander... and we had no charts.' The terrified passengers insisted on returning to Kulam. There they were well treated and set off again for Aden. They got there early in the season, so he sold his iron and spices very well. However, he wanted to take pepper back to Cairo, and it was very dear in Aden, so he decided to go back to India to buy it. In this ship he took to India he chartered space to hold 150 bahars for the return voyage back to Aden.138

We have discussed extensively the extent to which the rulers of the port cities intervened to advantage themselves or their trade. We have already noticed some rulers or agents of larger political structures intervening from time to time, and we can conclude with a more general discussion of wider political factors which affected trade by sea. We will look particularly at the matter of the effects of the rise and decline of landed empires on sea trade. In this the influence of a recent trend in European history will be evident. This aims to bring the state back in to explain at least in part economic exchange and development: it is not just a matter of the unseen hand of the market.139

Historians have been particularly interested in the fact that on two occasions during our period great empires provided security and a market for luxuries in different parts of the Indian Ocean world. The huge trade between China and the Abbasid empire has been linked to the rise and florescence of the Abbasid state after 750, and a similar situation with the T'ang dynasty in China from 618–907. The Fatimids in Egypt, the Colas in South India, and the Song in China produced the same effect in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.

There certainly seems to be some connection between flourishing trade and stable empires, albeit one hard to quantify. Such empires usually got most of their revenue from the land, not the sea, and prevailing norms were usually hostile, or at least indifferent, to sea trade and merchants, as we pointed out at the beginning of this chapter (see pages 62–3). Yet merchants did provide customs revenues, and perhaps more important brought curiosities and preciosities to the court. More generally, a strong, stable empire obviously has advantages for economic activity in general, including sea trade. Some states were actually quite interventionist. Srivijaya controlled the straits of Melaka for some time. In the early eleventh century the Cola state in south India responded to this with devastating raids. Thirteen ports in the Malay peninsula, Sumatra and the Nicobar Islands were attacked by Rajendra Cola.

The decline of empires usually produces much confusion, and this may be detrimental to trade, though on the other hand as an empire declines it will release hoarded wealth with which to defend itself, thereby increasing liquidity. Some notable episodes in the decline of these empires no doubt did impact on trade. In its last few decades the T'ang dynasty was less stable, and Guangzhou was sacked and foreign merchants massacred in 878 by a rebel army. At this same time, in 868–83, the Zanj slaves in lower Mesopotamia rebelled, and this is considered to have contributed to Abbasid decline. Later, the coup de grâce for the Abbasids, that is the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, may have disrupted trade, though this claim is open to doubt. The other great example of politics intervening in the ocean in our period is the cessation of Zheng He's voyages in the 1430s as a result of a change in Ming policy. The precise reasons for this shift have been much debated, but certainly these expeditions were terminated by the court, and foreign trade greatly restricted. However, this coincides with the rise of Melaka, and it is a 'chicken-and-egg' matter as to whether the rise of Melaka meant the great expeditions were no longer needed, as compared with the rise of Melaka being to fill the gap left by the end of the voyages. In any case, the whole matter of this connection is difficult indeed to prove. Perhaps the point to keep in mind is that there were much more constant and important matters which affected merchants engaged in sea trade, namely did their imports meet local demand, and were prices high?

In the early 1340s Ibn Battuta was happily sailing along the west coast of India when his ship was attacked by pirates:

the infidels came out against us in twelve warships, fought fiercely against us and overcame us. They took everything I had preserved for emergencies; they took the pearls and rubies that the king of Ceylon had given me, they took my clothes and the supplies given me by pious people and saints. They left me no covering except my trousers. They took everything everybody had and set us down on the shore. I returned to Qaliqut and went into one of the mosques. One of the jurists sent me a robe, the qadi a turban and one of the merchants another robe.140

Apart from again reminding us of how he could gear in to Islamic networks at need, this passage introduces the matter of piracy in the Indian Ocean in our period. Interestingly, Marco Polo had more or less the same problem, and we may note that Polo only slightly predated Ibn Battuta, for he died in 1324, a year before the latter set out from Morocco on his first hajj.

Polo wrote that on the west coast of India

there go forth every year more than a hundred corsair vessels on cruise. These pirates take with them their wives and children, and stay out the whole summer. Their method is to join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and then they form what they call a sea cordon, that is, they drop off till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so that they cover something like an hundred miles of sea, and no merchant vessel can escape them. For when any one corsair sights a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them.... But now the merchants are aware of this, and go so well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they don't fear the corsairs. Still mishaps do befall them at times.

With the King's connivance many corsairs launch from this part to plunder merchants. These corsairs have a covenant with the King that he shall get all the horses they capture, and all other plunder shall remain with them. The King does this because he has no horses of his own, whilst many are shipped from abroad towards India; for no ship ever goes thither without horses in addition to other cargo. The practice is naughty and unworthy of a king.141

What these two unfortunate travellers are describing is either piracy or corsair activity. Whichever it may be, it is crucial to distinguish this from actual naval activity from port cities or other political entities, for at this time there were virtually no navies in the Indian Ocean, the exceptions being perhaps Zheng He's voyages, and the activities in Sri Lanka, the islands, and the Malay world of the Colas. The real danger was from pirates and corsairs, the former to be seen as acting autonomously of any political entity, the latter connected, at least loosely, as Polo wrote, with a local ruler. Pirates were the most prevalent. Yet we need to keep in mind that some piracy is in the eye of the beholder; the so-called pirates could see themselves very differently, as we will discuss in detail in the next chapter.

Ibn Battuta had more than one skirmish with these predators, who were quite prepared to attack even very large ships. He set off from the Gulf of Cambay on an official mission from Muhammad bin Tughluq to the emperor of China. The mission had several ships, and one of them must have been a good size, as it carried seventy horses. Battuta's own ship had fifty rowers and fifty Abyssinian men at arms: 'These latter are the guarantors of safety on this sea; let there be but one of them on a ship and it will be avoided by the Indian pirates and idolators.'142 Chinese accounts of the straits of Melaka, then and now a haven for pirates, complained that the locals 'are very daring pirates. If they meet upon a foreign ship, they get into small boats, a hundred in number, and approach the enemy for several days. With a fair wind he may be lucky and escape. Otherwise he will be intercepted by them, and his goods will be plundered. Travellers who float around on the sea should guard against these robbers.'143

Some pirates seem to have set up almost state-like structures. Ibn Majid south of Calicut found that the pirates there, operating out of the Kerala backwaters, were 'ruled by their own rulers and number about 1000 men and are a people of both land and sea with small boats'.144 So also in the Gulf near Hurmuz in the twelfth century. The island of Kish was more or less a pirate state, or so the hostile accounts available say. These men raided up and down the Indian west coast, and across to East Africa. In 1135 they became very daring. They wrote to the ruler of Aden demanding a part of the city as protection against being raided. This was refused, so the pirate Amir sent fifteen ships, which entered Aden harbour and waited. They had no intention of landing: rather they wanted to capture merchant ships on their way back to India. Finally, two ships belonging to Abul Qasim Ramisht of Siraf, in the Gulf, appeared, but helped by troops from Aden they were able to beat off the pirates.145

Natural events were much more perilous for sea travellers than were pirates. People used various rites and ceremonies to try to avoid the perils of the sea. The sea was generally seen as more hostile, chancy, and uncontrollable than was land. There were the dangers of the deep, uncertain winds and tides, fickle fish, and frail craft on the ocean. Various rites and ceremonies were used to counter these dangers.

It would be easy to disparage these as blind superstition, yet Palmer has put forward an argument to show their utility. Magic, religion, ritual used in perilous times at sea have two positive results. They relieve anxiety amongst those in danger, and more generally they promote cooperation and solidarity amongst those on board, and this in turn can increase the chance of saving a ship which is in danger.146 It is in this context that we need to evaluate the following examples of rites and ceremonies from our period.

Let us start, as usual, with Ibn Battuta. In 1347 he was sailing south from China and they were lost at sea.

At first light on the forty-third day a mountain became visible in the sea about twenty miles away. The wind was carrying us directly towards it. The sailors were amazed and said 'We are not near land and there is no knowledge of a mountain in the sea. If the wind drives us on to it we shall perish.' Everyone resorted to self-abasement, to devotion, and to renewed repentance, supplicating God in prayer. We sought Him through his Prophet, on whom be the Blessing and Peace of God. The merchants swore to give plentiful alms, which I recorded in my own writing. [He wanted to be able to remind them of their vows once the danger had passed!] The wind became somewhat calmer and at sunrise we saw that the mountain had risen into the air and there was light between it and the sea. We were amazed at this, and I saw the sailors weeping and saying good-bye to each other. I said: 'What is the matter?' They said: 'What we took for a mountain is the rukhkh. If it sees us we shall perish.' We were then less than ten miles from it. Then God Most High gave us the blessing of a favourable wind, which took us directly away from it. We did not see it or know its true shape.147

What Battuta and his shipmates did was call on more or less normative Islamic ideas to avoid danger at sea. We have several other examples of this. A Chinese account of around 1200 wrote that in Malabar 'there is holy water which can still the wind and waves. The foreign traders fill opaque glass bottles with it, and when they suddenly get in a rough sea they still it by sprinkling this water on it.'148 The water was the celebrated Zamzam water, from a well in Mecca and believed to have a wide range of magical properties. Muslims also had a variety of prayers specific to perils at sea. One of the best known was the Hizb al-bahr, the Litany of the Sea, which dates from 656 AH.149 There was also a specific saint, Khwaja Khizr, associated with fertility, and so water, fish and the sea. He is to be found in many Sufi legends, and was frequently the object of prayers in order that he would guide mariners through dangerous waters.150 Some Muslims took a more resigned approach to danger at sea, as Ibn Battuta found near Oman in 1329. A violent storm blew up.

There was accompanying us in the vessel a pilgrim [who] knew the Qur'an by heart and could write excellently. When he saw the storminess of the sea, he wrapped his head in a mantle that he had and pretended to sleep. When God gave us relief from what had befallen us, I said to him 'O Mawlana Khidr, what kind of thing did you see?' He replied 'When the storm came I kept my eyes open, watching to see whether the angels who receive men's souls had come. As I could not see them, I said 'Praise be to God. If any of us were to be drowned, they would come to take the souls.' Then I would close my eyes and after a while open them again, to watch in the same manner, until God relieved us.151

In 1444 Abd-er-Razzak was troubled at the prospect of travelling by sea from Honavar (Onor) to Hurmuz, but then he came across a Quranic passage which read, 'Fear nothing, for thou hast been preserved from the hand of unjust men.' He took this as a good omen, though nevertheless he had a terrible 65 day passage from Honavar to Hurmuz. His ship ran into a violent storm once it reached the open ocean, and he called on divine intercession to save him and his fellows. His account, even in translation, is full of Islamic images and metaphors. It is a stunning depiction by a landlubber of a storm at sea, rivalling, in my opinion, the best accounts in European literature, including those by Conrad.

On a sudden there arose a violent wind on the surface of the sea, and on all sides were heard groaning and cries. The night, the vessel, the wind, and the gulf, presented to our minds all the forebodings of a catastrophe. On a sudden, through the effect of the contrary winds, which resembled men in their drink, the wine which produced this change penetrated even to the vessel. The planks of which it was composed, and which by their conformation seemed to form a continuous line, were on the point of becoming divided like the separate letters of the alphabet. . . . The sailor, who, with regard to his skill in swimming, might be compared to a fish, was anxious to throw himself into the water like an anchor. The captain, although familiarised with the navigation of all the seas, shed bitter tears, and had forgotten all his science. The sails were torn, the mast was entirely bent by the shock of the wind. The different grades of passengers who inhabited this floating house threw out upon the waves riches of great value, and, after the manner of the Sufis, voluntarily stripped themselves of their worldly goods. Who could give a thought to the jeopardy in which their money and their stuffs were placed, when life itself, which is so dear to man, was in danger? For myself, in this situation, which brought before my eyes all the threatening terrors which the ocean had in its power to present, with tears in my eyes I gave myself up for lost. Through the effect of the stupor, and of the profound sadness to which I became prey, I remained, like the sea, with my lips dry and my eyes moist, and resigned myself entirely to the Divine Will. At one time, through the driving of the waves, which resembled mountains, the vessel was lifted up to the skies; at another, under the impulse of the violent winds, it descended like divers to the bottom of the waters.

He prayed hard, and reflected on his fate.

I was in the middle of these reflections, and everything about me spoke of dejection and trouble, when at length, by virtue of that Divine promise: 'Who is He who hears the prayers of the afflicted, and drives away his misery?' [Quran, s. 27, verse 63] on a sudden, the zephyr of God's infinite mercy began to blow upon me.... The morning of joy began to dawn from the East of happiness.... The impetuous hurricane was changed to a favourable wind, the tossing of the waves ceased, and the seas, in conformity with my desires, became completely calm.152

We get only glimpses of what it was really like travelling by sea at this time. Many of the accounts we do have, such as some of those just quoted in the discussion of 'superstition', are about the dangers of life at sea, for as one would expect these impacted decisively on landlubbers. Given the large role of Muslims in trade at this time, many accounts are from Muslim men travelling to trade, or for fun. There is a large and fabulous Islamic travel literature. The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, from the time when the Abbasid empire was at its height, is best known, but there is also Buzurg's collection from the tenth century, with copious tall stories featuring giant whales, mermaids, islands with only women, a snake that ate an elephant, as so on. Sindbad is equally fabulous and exciting, but he does at least provide an evocative explanation for why people wanted to travel. He was constantly prompted to leave a secure and mundane life ashore and head off for adventure and profit. 'I was living a life of unexampled pleasure [in Baghdad] when, one day, the old desire entered my head to visit far countries and strange people, to voyage among the isles and curiously regard things hitherto unknown to me; also, the trading habit rose in me again.' This happens to explain the start of each voyage. For example, concerning the beginning of his sixth voyage:

I was sitting one day taking the air before my door and feeling as happy as I had ever felt, when I saw a group of merchants passing in the street, who had every appearance of returned travellers. This sight recalled to me how joyful a thing it is to return from journeying, to see the birth land after far voyage, and the thought made me want to travel again. I equipped myself with merchandise of price, suitable for the sea, and left the city of Baghdad for Basrah. There I found a great ship filled with merchants and notables as well provided with goods for trading as myself, so I had my bales carried on board, and soon we peacefully set sail from Basrah.153

Many Muslims travelled by sea to fulfil their pious obligation to perform the hajj. Ibn Jubayr was merely going across the Red Sea, from 'Aydhab to Jiddah, yet he had a horror voyage, one which, given the notorious difficulty of navigation in these treacherous waters, was probably not that unusual. It took eight days to cover a distance, as the crow flies, of about 300 km.

There had been the sudden crises of the sea, the perversity of the wind, the many reefs encountered, and the emergencies that arose from the imperfections of the sailing gear which time and again became entangled and broke when sails were raised or lowered or an anchor raised. At times the bottom of the jilabah would run against a reef when passing through them, and we would listen to a rumbling that called us to abandon hope. Many times we died and lived again....154

We quoted above Abd-er-Razzak's account of a storm in 1444, and how his prayers saved the ship. This occurred on his return voyage back to Hurmuz, but when he had set out from there in 1442 it was his first sea voyage, and he was already a bit apprehensive: 'The events, the perils, which accompany a voyage by sea (and which in themselves constitute a shoreless and a boundless ocean), present the most marked indication of the Divine omnipotence, the grandest evidence of the wisdom which is sublime.' His ship finally left from Hurmuz in May 1442, at the end of the monsoon, 'when tempests and attacks from pirates are to be dreaded.' It was a terrible voyage. 'As soon as I caught the smell of the vessel, and 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.' He need not have worried too much, as they had missed the season and they all got off at Muscat. Then he got sick, and finally had a good eighteen-day voyage to Calicut around September 1442. He recovered during the voyage:

In short, the air of the sea having become more salubrious, gave me the hope of a perfect cure; the morning of health began to dawn upon the longing of my hopes; the wounds caused by the sharp arrows of my malady began to heal, and the water of life, hitherto so troubled, recovered its purity and transparency. Before long a favourable breeze began to blow, and the vessel floated over the surface of the water with the rapidity of the wind.155

We can end this long chapter by returning one last time to our hero, Ibn Battuta. As a landlubber he left invaluable accounts of what it was like at this time. We have commented frequently on how his status as a prestigious scholar eased his passage, for everywhere he was accepted and patronised and helped by fellow Muslims. His Rehla also gives us evocative accounts of many different sorts of travel by water, and many different perils and pleasures, just as Abd-er-Razzack found too.

His maritime career began inauspiciously. In 1329 in Jiddah he embarked on a jalba (a small sewn craft) which belonged to a person from Abyssinia. A sharif wanted him to travel with him on another jalba, 'but I did not do so on account of there being a number of camels with him in his jalba, and I was frightened of this, never having travelled by sea before.' Later that year he tells us what he had to eat. He was near Oman on a small ship:

My food during those days on that ship was dried dates and fish. Every morning and evening [the sailors] used to catch fish. . . . They used to cut them in pieces, broil them, and give every person on the ship a portion, showing no preference to anyone over another, not even to the master of the vessel nor to any other, and they would eat them with dried dates. I had with me some bread and biscuit... and when these were exhausted I had to live on those fish with the rest of them.156

Later he had good times and bad times at sea. Once he had a most luxurious trip with the governor of Lahari in Sind on the river of Sind. There were fifteen small ships to carry baggage and various retainers. Some were musicians and singers.

First the drums and trumpets would be sounded and then the musicians would sing, and they kept this up alternately from early morning to the hour of the midday meal. When this moment arrived the ships came together and closed up with one another and gangways were placed from one to the other. The musicians then came on board the governor's ahawra and sang until he finished eating, when they had their meal and at the end of it returned to their vessel.157

Another voyage a few years later was a very different matter. In the mid 1340s he was shipwrecked off the Coromandel coast:

During the voyage a gale sprang up and our ship nearly took in water. We had no knowledgeable pilot on board. We came to some rocks on which the ship narrowly escaped being wrecked, and then into some shallows where the ship ran aground. We were face to face with death, and people jettisoned all that they had, and bade farewell to one another. We cut down the mast and threw it overboard, and the sailors made a wooden raft. We were then about two farsakhs from the shore. I was going to climb down to the raft, when my companions (for I had two slave-girls and two of my companions with me) said to me: 'Are you going to go down and leave us?' So I put their safety before my own and said: 'You two go down and take with you the girl that I love.' The [other] girl said: 'I am a good swimmer and I shall hold on to one of the raft ropes and swim with them.' So both my companions... and the one girl went on the raft, the other girl swimming. The sailors tied ropes to the raft, and swam with their aid. I sent along with them all the things that I valued and the gems and ambergris, and they reached the shore in safety because the wind was in their favour. I myself stayed on the ship. The captain made his way ashore on the rudder. The sailors set to work to make four rafts, but night fell before they were completed, and the ship took in water. I climbed on the poop and stayed there until morning, when a party of infidels came out to us in a boat we went ashore with them to the coast of Ma'bar.158

Ibn Battuta here showed a concern for his slave girls, and he wrote once of them that 'it is my habit never to travel without them.'159 He is not however referring to the same two girls all the time, for he was, as Dunn puts it in his excellent reconstruction of his travels, 'a man with a long history of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in various parts of the Muslim world.'160 He had a son to a Moroccan woman/wife in Damascus, who died age 10, a daughter to a slave girl in Bukhara, who died, a daughter in Delhi to a wife, another to a slave girl in Malabar, a son in the Maldives to a wife. Indeed, he 'married several women' in the Maldives. He pointed out that 'Any of the visitors who wishes to marry may do so, but when it is time to leave he divorces the woman, because their women never leave the country.'161 Given that he usually travelled with at least one slave girl, we can only assume his progeny were scattered all over the shores of the Indian Ocean and beyond.

In this matter he was not unusual, and we may assume that not only Muslim travellers had 'wives in every port'. Vincent Le Blanc was impressed with the system he found in Cambay (see page 98). Yet it has been found in the Muslim case much more than in other societies at this time. Some members of the crew that Alan Villiers sailed with had several wives in different places. One nakhoda from Sur had a son in Pemba, another in the Comoros, and a daughter from a secondary wife from the African interior.162The Muslim custom of allowing several 'legal' wives, and then the practice, in theory only Shiah but in fact done more widely, of muta, or temporary marriage, which really became part of customary law among travelling Muslims, made it much easier for Muslims to follow this maritime tradition. Ibn Battuta may have been more scrupulous in this matter, for in the Maldives at least he divorced his wives before he left.