Download PDF | Jonathan Shepard (editor), Luke Treadwell (editor) - Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age_ In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan (Library of Medieval Studies) (VOL. 10)-I.B. Tauris (2023).
449 Pages
Preface
The AHRC-funded research project Dirhams for Slaves (2013–17) hypothesized that the hundreds of thousands of dirhams found in hoards strewn across northern Europe were the residue of a large-scale trading system connecting the region with the Islamic world in the ninth and tenth centuries, one in which slaves played a key role. Ibn Fadlan’s account – rare testimony to this trade – cried out for interdisciplinary study, prompting both an Oxford conference (‘Lost in Translation? Ibn Fadlan and the Great Unwashed’, March 2016) and now this book.
Interdisciplinarity poses its own editorial challenges, and in attempting to make the book clear and accessible to English-speaking non-specialists, we may distress our specialist colleagues. We have tried to use recognizable proper names and technical terms and offer a list of alternative place names (with modern equivalents where known) to help locate towns and regions styled radically differently by various occupants or neighbours. Quotations are usually in English and, unless otherwise stated, translations, tables and graphs are by our authors. Where possible, we offer explanations of technical terms or foreign words in situ but also a short glossary at the back. Maps at the front help locate key places and areas mentioned.
Common Era dates are generally given without the use of ‘ce’ or ‘ad’, and we have not automatically included ah dates unless important for the author’s argument. And while acknowledging the issues around such words as ‘slave’, ‘barbarian’ or ‘civilized’, and the offence they now cause, we have respected the usage of the published translations. Arabic diacritics have mostly been discarded in proper names, since they do not help, and in fact may distract, non-Arabic-readers; they are, however, given in the Glossary. We use the definite article al- unless an individual is better known without (Tusi rather than al-Tusi, for example) and lists of Abbasid and Samanid rulers and their reign dates are given at the end of the book. Full diacritics have generally been abandoned for individual words and technical terms unless discussion hinges on semantic points or the text is particularly technical. We have also tried to be consistent yet accessible in transliterating Cyrillic, using a modified version of the Library of Congress system.
We have attempted standardization for two key terms – ‘Viking Age’ and ‘Eastern Europe’ – both of which mean different things to scholars in different disciplines and countries. Here we intend the Viking Age to run roughly from 800 to 1050. Eastern Europe signifies the area between the mountain ranges of the Urals (to the east), the Caucasus (to the south), the Carpathians (to the west) and the shores of the Baltic and Barents seas to the north, roughly coterminous with present-day Ukraine, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and European Russia.
Another standardization is how we style Ibn Fadlan’s account itself. ‘Kitab’ refers to the version found, along with three other texts, in the Mashhad Manuscript; and ‘the Miscellany’ to this unique compilation of four texts.1 We have generally cited from the authoritative 2014 edition and English translation by James Montgomery, and the readily accessible 2012 English translation by the late Paul Lunde and Caroline Stone,2 adopting the subdivisions given in the former rather than the folios of the Mashhad Manuscript.3 Our cover picture depicts the funeral of a Rus, commissioned by the State Historical Museum in Moscow and painted in 1884 by Henryk Siemiradzki, some forty years before the discovery of the Mashhad Manuscript.
Although trying conscientiously to convey what could be gleaned from Yaqut’s excerpts from Ibn Fadlan,4 Siemiradzki relied on scholars’ sometimes erroneous interpretations, leading him to show idols as being involved in the funeral proceedings, to the left of the picture. However, it also lent support to those historians arguing that Ibn Fadlan was describing what he saw and heard on the Volga and was not simply telling tales of marvels. Our warm thanks go to Alex Wright, Rory Gormley and his team, Sophie Campbell and Paige Harris at IB Tauris and Bloomsbury, for their immense patience and unfailing support; to Kaveya Saravanan and all at Integra for their help in seeing this volume through to print; to David McCutcheon for his excellent maps; and to Nicola Sigsworth, without whose immensely hard work, good humour and superlative research, organizational and copy-editing skills, this book would never have seen the light of day.
For help in obtaining images, our thanks go to Natalia Zhukova of the State Historical Museum, Moscow; Marion Fjelde Larsen of the Lofotr Viking Museum; Ivar Leimus of Eesti Ajaloomuuseum, Tallinn; and to two of our contributors, Heinrich Härke and Veronika Murasheva, without whose assistance we would be missing our cover image. We thank our anonymous reader for their constructive criticism.
And our heartfelt thanks to Fedir Androshchuck, Director-General of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine in Kyiv, for going above and beyond in the most difficult of times. Finally, we thank our long-suffering authors, both for their fine contributions and for their almost infinite patience. The publication was delayed by events, including the Covid-19 pandemic, and many contributions were submitted for publication in mid2017. We are also aware that finalizing and proofing their chapters were, for some, completed in the worst of times.
Jonathan Shepard and Luke Treadwell
First impressions: Immediacy and trusty service
The story, told in the first person, of a mission far to the north of Baghdad beginning on 21 June 921, looks almost too good to be true. Details of dates, colleagues, stopping places and even the weather intersperse pen portraits of the peoples encountered and their ways of life. Meetings with their leaders are recounted, culminating with the receptions the author-narrator received at the court of Almish ibn Shilki (Almış elteber), ruler of the Volga Bulgars on the Middle Volga, where he represents himself as reading out the official letters he has brought.1
The outward journey takes almost a year, yet the narrative is fast-paced and gives a running commentary on the habitats and strange ways of the non-Muslim societies encountered en route from the Aral Sea to the Volga Bulgars (themselves quite recent converts to Islam). The author-narrator portrays himself as sharp-eyed and curious, asking about people’s customs and reproducing conversations in direct speech. Attempts to convert individuals to Islam, along with general discussions about beliefs, feature before and after arrival on the Middle Volga, one non-believer jeering in the author-narrator’s face.2 Cross-cutting between what he saw, heard and did brings immediacy, while touches of humour lighten tales of near-horror: wintering in the region of the Aral Sea ‘made us think a gate to the cold of hell had opened up before us’, with ‘the camels […] floundering up to their knees’.3
Little surprise that Ibn Fadlan’s story has spawned a bestseller and Hollywood movie.4 The original intention was a full-blown mission, in response to Almish’s request for ‘people to instruct him in law and acquaint him with the rules of Islam according to the shariʿa’, as well as for funds to build a mosque and a fortress to protect him, notably from the formidable people living astride the Lower Volga, the Khazars.5 Here, then, is what is essentially an eyewitness reportage on how the Abbasid caliphate was extending its culturo-religious reach to a people north of the Eurasian steppes.
The mission is datable to 921/2 and, if we believe Ibn Fadlan, his role was pivotal. Although not starting out as the chief envoy of the caliph,6 he was given responsibility for the diplomatic gifts and for the mission’s teachers and legal scholars, besides reading out the official letters to Almish. He comes across as effectively being in charge of the mission by the time its rump arrived at the Volga Bulgar court.7 So far, so lively and convincing. Unfortunately, nothing is known for sure about our author-narrator beyond what he chooses to tell us. No other work mentions Ibn Fadlan or the mission, save those incorporating or citing from his text. And there is nothing else quite like this style of autobiographical writing in Classical Arabic literature.
The way in which Ibn Fadlan ‘speaks’ to us like a modern reporter enlivens the story, along with his word painting of other people’s mores, particularly the Scandinavian Rus traders.8 The sense of nearness is, however, illusory. What reads like a companionable travelogue changes gear towards the end. An eyewitness report on the boat-burning of an eminent Rus is followed by a brief sketch of the court of the Rus’ ruler. This, unlike the description of Almish’s court or the Samanid Nasr II’s, does not come from Ibn Fadlan’s own observations. Neither does the following section, on the Khazars and their ruler’s court, offer eyewitness observations or state outright that the author ever went there.9
Whether the Khazar section really comes from Ibn Fadlan’s pen is uncertain: some scholars take it for an excerpt from some other work subsequently added to Ibn Fadlan’s text.10 In any case, the text, as it stands, comes to a sudden halt without mentioning any further meetings with the Volga Bulgar ruler. There is barely a word about the return journey, although Ibn Fadlan does flag up his mission’s eventual departure from Bulgar territory.11 This could simply be a question of text survival. The only version of Ibn Fadlan’s account we have appears in Razawi MS 5229 (the Mashhad Manuscript).
Before this manuscript was discovered in 1923 by Ahmed Zeki Velidi Togan in the library of the Imam Reza Shrine at Mashhad in Iran, our only detailed knowledge of Ibn Fadlan’s text came from the thirteenth-century scholar Yaqut, who explicitly excerpted passages from it for his Muʿjam al-buldan (‘Dictionary of Countries’).12 The Mashhad Manuscript is a majmuʿa (miscellany) which contains three other geographical works in addition to Ibn Fadlan’s Kitab: Ibn al-Faqih’s Akhbar al buldan and two short travelogues (generally known as Risalas) by Abu Dulaf. This majmuʿa (the Miscellany) was compiled early in the second half of the tenth century, our only copy being the Mashhad Manuscript.13 But neither Yaqut nor the Mashhad Manuscript counts as a contemporary witness to what the author-narrator may – or may not – have said. And the Mashhad Manuscript has yet to undergo full codicological analysis.
Text and context
Our first chapter by Viacheslav Kuleshov considers what little we know about Ibn Fadlan, when and why he wrote – and how his account has fared. It sketches how Yaqut discovered it in early thirteenth-century Merv and how parts made their way into later Arabic geographies of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries, as well as outlining how the Mashhad Manuscript has come to scholarly attention over the past century and offering an overview of the various editions and translations available. It then considers the text’s components, breaking them down into three layers: narrative, ethnographic observations and tales of wonders. The text of Ibn Fadlan’s Kitab fairly recently received intensive scrutiny and a new master edition and translation,14 and our volume contains an exegesis from the editor, James Montgomery, of how he went about editing the manuscript and the difficulties he encountered. He points out that part of it reads like a logbook, detailing routes, journey times and some of the dates as the party advanced towards the north.15 Montgomery also notes that he – along with most other scholars – have long followed standard editions in Classical Arabic; closer scrutiny, however, has led to his extremely important proposition that the text was originally written in informal – Middle – Arabic and thus has no pretension to the classical literary style prevalent among geographers, historians and other writers of the period.16 We lack documentation surviving from the Abbasid archives to give us the standard register for working papers and running reports.17 But a despatch written in Middle Arabic would have something of a counterpart in the plain style of an almost contemporaneous Byzantine handbook on statecraft. The syntax and terminology of parts of the De administrando imperio, along with the report(s) on the Rus incorporated within it, prefigure later Greek usage.18 Despite being fairly hypothetical, all future studies on Ibn Fadlan will need to take stock of Montgomery’s finding.19 Until the discovery of the Mashhad Manuscript in 1923, our principal conduit to the text of Ibn Fadlan’s account was through Yaqut’s early thirteenth-century Muʿjam al-buldan. Yaqut’s treatment of the text and his principles of excerpting duly come under scrutiny from Luke Treadwell. This is, in effect, in continuation of an earlier study,20 where Treadwell argues that the contents of the Miscellany as a whole have been somewhat neglected – Ibn al-Faqih’s Akhbar al buldan and the two short travelogues by Abu Dulaf, in addition to Ibn Fadlan’s Kitab. He raises the possibility that the whole Miscellany was actually put together by the trickster-cum-litterateur Abu Dulaf, offering a case casting some doubt on the status of Ibn Fadlan’s text.21 The chapter by Jean-Charles Ducène considers the oldest reconstructable Arabic description of the peoples of Eastern Europe, the ‘Anonymous Relation’, long attributed to al-Jayhani. Ducène concludes that the ‘Anonymous Relation’ was more likely reworked by al-Jayhani from an earlier hypothetical source, one also used by Ibn Rusta and other writers. Ibn Fadlan’s report stands apart from these non-eyewitness, ‘armchair’ travellers’ reports and does not show signs of indebtedness to any particular geographical text known from this era, as Ducène’s study makes clear.22 Nevertheless, Ibn Fadlan’s overviews of the politico-military structures and customs of the peoples he encountered are what might be expected of a competent senior member of a diplomatic mission. And they are carried out in an essentially conventional mode, for all their immediacy. If there is something formulaic in the treatment of beliefs, burial and marital customs, and sexual taboos (or lack thereof) backgrounded by issues of climate and habitat, it reflects on the ethnography of classical antiquity. This still coloured the outlook of earlier medieval Christian writers trying to classify the peoples of the steppes and the north.23 That aspects of Ibn Fadlan’s report should call to mind such stereotyping is hardly surprising. He was, after all, one of ‘the people of the pen’, even if not writing in high-style prose.24 So he would scarcely have been ignorant of Islamic geographers and their interest in the interconnectedness between human and physical geography or of their ‘humanizing’ (and Islamizing) of the Ptolemaic tradition.25 Compliance with their conventions would have served to bolster Ibn Fadlan’s credentials as a diplomat, acting and observing on behalf of the caliphate.
The Arabic geographers reflected a keener interest in the northern peoples that came with the waning of caliphal power and the vigorousness of steppe groupings like the Ghuzz (Oghuz) and Pechenegs. This interest was mirrored in the west, where the arrival of other Turkic-speaking people in the late ninth century – in this case, the Hungarians – caused a similar stir and where information about the steppe peoples was also in demand. The pattern of interest in northerners among western writers is the subject of our next two chapters. Walter Pohl looks at the cosmographies which updated the works of the Ptolemaic geographers, such as the Cosmography of Ravenna. Despite writing in classical mode (as did the Arabic geographers), these nevertheless sought to impose a sense of order and the rational rather than simply repeating false reports and stereotypes about the ‘barbarians’. Writers like Regino of Prüm tried to allay fears of the End of the World triggered by the Hungarians’ arrival. Indeed their very name may have engendered the word ‘ogre’. Monstrous as they appeared to Christians in the west, their lifestyle and form of warfare were typical of steppe peoples. In fact, to Byzantine observers, as most probably to Arabic writers, they looked more amenable than the Pechenegs – the very steppe peoples the Muslims were facing to their north and who are described very briefly by Ibn Fadlan. When the Byzantines declared that the Hungarians should expel the Pechenegs and settle in their lands, they refused point-blank to fight these ‘devil’s brats’; as Steven Runciman noted, the westerners’ alarm at the Hungarians lacked a ‘sense of proportion’: they ‘did not know the Pechenegs’.26 One response of western churchmen was, in effect, to go on the spiritual offensive, attempting to convert the northern peoples to Christianity. Ian Wood considers these missionary efforts of the later tenth and early eleventh centuries, when the Latin west was starting to recover, being better funded, with a strong German monarchy and becoming ecclesiastically venturesome. They inspired accounts of the attempts to convert Slavs, Prussians and Pechenegs, accounts which combine reports of missionary feats with sprinklings of marvels and monsters. The paradox that Wood brings out is this: it is the monsters which make early medieval travel writing credible, in effect proving that the writer had been there. Just as Ibn Fadlan’s dwelling on these wonders might seem to detract from his credentials as a lively yet reliable reporter and diplomat, to see any inconsistency or sharp contradiction between reportage and marvels is to misunderstand medieval conceptions about outsiders. Some races out there are expected to be monstrous.27 Thus even authors like the Frankish missionary Rimbert, whose account of his travels is of almost impeccable authority, could claim to have gone to where there were dog-headed beings in the next villages along. Such attestations actually serve to strengthen a traveller’s claim to have boldly ventured to parts of the world where monsters were real. Not long after the year 1000, Bruno of Querfurt, having written of Adalbert of Prague being menaced by ‘dog-heads’, ‘fully expected to meet them’ himself upon setting forth in the missionary’s footsteps.28
All this bears on Ibn Fadlan in two ways. Firstly, similar attempts were being made on the part of the Muslim authorities to foment conversion to Islam, if not of the nomads themselves, at least of those on the other side of steppes such as the Volga Bulgars. Although Ibn Fadlan’s mission was probably at the Volga Bulgars’ initiative, the caliphate was understandably interested in exploiting this. The theme of mission which we find in Ibn Fadlan may be explained by this impulse, and may reflect a general sense among bureaucrats in Baghdad that the more they could tame the peoples of the steppe, the better. As in the west, there was still contempt for barbarians but also desire to convert them. Secondly, all good stories are embellished and authenticated by a touch of the marvellous as well as by intimations of the End of the World syndrome,29 as seen in both Pohl and Ducène. The next two chapters – by Hugh Kennedy, and Irina Arzhantseva and Heinrich Härke – deal with quite short sections of Ibn Fadlan’s account which have been undeservedly neglected or at least seen in isolation. The few pages on the journey from Baghdad to the Samanid dominions give quite a clear picture of travelling conditions: on the one hand, insecurity along the route and rampant secessionism is taken for granted; on the other, a road network which is efficiently maintained. The insecurity confronting Ibn Fadlan and his party once nearing Rayy is dramatized by the fact that they have to hide and disguise themselves among fellow members of their caravan for fear of detection by a local dynast raising support for his ally, the militant Shiʿi ruler of Daylam – and deadly foe of the Abbasids.30 Conversely, once entering Samanid territory they could feel safe.31 The presumption was that travel, and financing, would be more assured once the party entered the purlieus of a polity that was self-standing, yet generally deferential towards the caliphal government’s wishes. A similar pattern unfolds in the mission’s dealings with the leaders of Muslim polities still further north. The Khwarazmshah, governing Khwarazm on behalf of the Samanid ruler, initially blocks the mission’s progress. Permission is eventually granted, and the Khwarazmshah avows nothing but respect for the caliph, but the need for such negotiations registers the likely tensions of a contact zone whose loyalties are tangled and where dealings with the nomads of the steppes are routine. A fair degree of commercial interdependence obtains, albeit laced with suspicion. Ibn Fadlan devotes only a brief passage to his journey from Bukhara to Jurjaniyya and has little to say about the town of Jurjaniyya itself, where he spent the winter, save that it has a bazaar and a bathhouse.32 Contemporary written evidence for the region is sparse and it is here that the archaeological data offered by Härke and Arzhantseva can help fill in the picture. Jurjaniyya itself was vast and, with perhaps as many as 100,000 inhabitants,33 far larger than any other city under the Khwarazmshah save for his capital, itself called Khwarazm (or, less confusingly, Kath).34 The types of pottery found at a town like Jiqarband, on the caravan route taken by Ibn Fadlan northwards from Bukhara, indicate the presence of sizable numbers of Ghuzz Turks.35 Archaeological evidence tells of a great upswing in prosperity in the ninth century, with the region acting as a contact zone between urban civilization and steppe nomads. Burial sites suggest that Islamic practices were increasingly adopted yet with traces of pre-Islamic ritual persisting, very much as Ibn Fadlan reports. Evidence from the Ust-Yurt Plateau and the northern steppes is sparse. It does, however, show the development of caravanserais for overland travellers, seemingly not long before Ibn Fadlan journeyed there. Ghuzz burial sites also reveal the persistence of Turkic paganism on the northern steppes, despite some limited penetration by Islam. To the east of the Aral Sea, around the ‘marsh towns’ of the Syr Darya delta, there are signs that both the settled population and surrounding nomads were involved in transregional trade; intriguingly, the remains of what might have been a slave pen have come to light – fitting nicely with what Ibn Fadlan says about the slave trade in general and the Volga Bulgars’ engagement with it. The Khazars are a case apart as the subtitle to Nick Evans’ chapter – ‘The hidden centre’ – suggests. A looming presence over the Middle Volga’s Bulgars, the Khazars were ‘hidden’ in various senses. We have no firm evidence that Ibn Fadlan ever went to Khazaria. Even if he did, his information about its rulers is most unlikely to be eyewitness: he is likelier to have picked it up en route since it deals with their seclusion and burial practices, phenomena he is most unlikely to have seen for himself. The picture of a power with a truly formidable army which we gain from the last section of Ibn Fadlan’s account is consistent with a theme pervading the rest of the text: that in one way or another the Khazars overshadow virtually all the peoples whom Ibn Fadlan encounters. This is not surprising, given that the very purpose of his mission was to build a fortress and solemnize an alliance with the Volga Bulgars against the Khazars. But as Evans points out, there was a great deal of in-flow and out-flow of individuals from Khazaria: many Khazars lived and worked in Abbasid lands; some had even gone out into the steppes; and one of the envoys sent by Almish to request a mission from Baghdad was himself of Khazar origin. Ibn Fadlan’s description of the Rus and the funeral of one of their leaders is undeniably what he is most famous for. This part of his work tends to be used both as a general illustration of the Viking way of life and as an eyewitness report that might help determine just who were the Rus. Were they of Scandinavian stock? Do any of the customs attested by Ibn Fadlan have a counterpart elsewhere in the Scandinavian world or in other cultures? Our chapters in this section cover a wide range of evidence and allow for various possibilities: that Ibn Fadlan’s Rus were, indeed, largely of Scandinavian stock, albeit having picked up a few practices in the eastern lands; or that they represent a branch of Scandinavians who had been living in the eastern lands long enough to acquire many rites and customs which differed markedly from those of their counterparts further west. Our chapters set out such different perspectives and it is scarcely surprising that they are not in full agreement with one another.
The vitality of Scandinavian ways among the travellers to the eastern lands emerges from Neil Price’s chapter, taking a fresh look at Ibn Fadlan’s reportage on the Vikingstyle boat-burning he witnessed. Price detects a similarity between these rites and both an Old Norse saga and early modern Faroese wedding celebrations. As part of the slave girl’s preparations for joining her late master in paradise, the Rus build something akin to a door-frame. On upturned palms, she is raised three times to look over the top, finally declaring that she can see her master in paradise.36 The verses from an Old Norse saga describe a farmwife’s demand to be lifted above the lintel of a door in hopes of seeing and retrieving ‘the holy sacrifice’, a massively phallic symbol that had just been thrown out of the house by a Christian king. The possibility that these verses may echo rites from the Viking Age, albeit in garbled form, gains in credibility from comparison with a prominent feature of wedding celebrations reported in the late seventeenth century from the Faroe Islands.37 Thus we may view, through Ibn Fadlan’s lenses, scenes of rites that were being performed in one variant or another across the Viking world long after his time. Parallels between far-distant parts of the Scandinavian world are not so surprising in light of the evidence for trade between far-flung emporia, especially in the earlier stages of the Viking Age, discussed by Søren Sindbæk. The Rus’ preoccupation, noted by Ibn Fadlan, with dirhams, gold dinars and profit is consistent with the fact that the Scandinavians had adopted weights and scales based on units consistent with Islamic weight systems a couple of generations earlier.38 The closeness of Ibn Fadlan’s observation of the Rus’ ornaments and behaviour is suggested by details which at first sight look anomalous. This holds true of his claim that a particularly high value is put by the Rus on dark-green ceramic beads, whereas beads in the Nordic world were generally made of other materials, such as glass. However, Sindbæk points out, beads that were coloured green and turquoise and with a coarse surface were much in vogue there in the early tenth century; at this same time alkaline glazed jars with roughly the same colour range were in use in southern Iraq. So it is very possible that Ibn Fadlan, observing the opaque-looking dark-green beads, jumped to the conclusion that they were ceramic, a familiar-enough material from life in Baghdad.39 The types of Scandinavian presence in the eastern lands varied: for example, those whom Ibn Fadlan encountered were in no position to settle in the Bulgar ruler’s domain of the Middle Volga. This was an era when groupings of Scandinavians were constantly on the lookout for convenient vantage points from which to dominate trade routes, sometimes setting up permanent installations, sometimes stopping only fleetingly. Veronika Murasheva offers a snapshot of both these tendencies. Firstly, she discusses excavations undertaken at Supruty, a stronghold overlooking the Upa river – a link between important riverways – that was initially occupied mainly by Slavs. Sometimein the ninth century this site in the Slav-Khazar borderlands was taken over by a grouping whose men wielded typically Viking-style weapons and whose horses’ bridlefittings were of Nordic type; so, too, were the temple rings worn by their womenfolk. Presumably these well-armed northerners aimed to profit from passing traders, while making exactions from the local Slav population, even picking up something of their ways. However, their spell of dominance came to an abrupt end when some other Viking band made a sudden attack sometime in the first quarter of the tenth century: no one was left alive to bury the dead.40 Secondly, in this same first quarter of the tenth century, an extensive trading settlement was beginning to form further west, at Gnezdovo on the Upper Dnieper. This, like Supruty, was oriented towards the riverways, but it proved more durable, eventually attracting miscellaneous population groups and developing into a major emporium. Thus Ibn Fadlan’s stay on the Volga took place at a time of experimentation and rapid (sometimes violent) change. The similarities between Ibn Fadlan’s descriptions of the treatment of the sick and the newly dead by the Rus and by the Ghuzz Turks receive attention from Thorir Jonsson Hraundal.41 He points to ethnographic hints of the Rus’ adoption of funerary customs from the steppe peoples, notably that of running horses to the point of exhaustion.42 His findings suggest how generations of interaction with nomadic peoples may have left their mark on those northerners whose quest for silver took them towards – or across – the steppes. This incidentally fits with archaeological indications – from trading settlements like Gnezdovo on the Upper Dnieper to the market-cum-powerbase of Birka in central Sweden – of nomadic-style weaponry being used and oriental belt mounts sported, along with silken caftans worn as elite costumes.43 However, other than Ibn Fadlan’s, we have no contemporary reports of all these goings-on, so it seems worth taking note of reactions from further afield. In his chapter, Jonathan Shepard compares descriptions of the situation in the North Sea’s eastern reaches and in the Black Sea steppes that were lodged at two courts at opposite ends of the Viking world: those of King Alfred of Wessex and Constantine VII Porphyrogennetos. The accounts by Ohthere and Wulfstan included in Alfred’s Old English Orosius make no explicit mention of silver but, taken together, they outline the main routes that were yielding wealth to the Danes, Alfred’s principal adversaries. A couple of generations later, a comparable report about the Rus’ dominance of sites along the Dnieper was prepared for Constantine VII. Here, too, the main explicit concern was geopolitical, but the wealth accruing from trading is axiomatic. This trade, however, was predominantly in silks and slaves rather than silver and furs. Ibn Fadlan spent several months travelling around the Volga Bulgars’ lands in the company of their ruler, Almish. No writings from the Volga Bulgars themselves survive to confirm or qualify the impressions he gained. However, archaeological excavations go some way to fill in the picture, as the chapters of Evgeniy P. Kazakov and Leonard Nedashkovsky show. Evidence of mosques or stone buildings is scant, although a tenth-century wooden mosque at Biliar (probably the site of the market called ‘Bulgar’ in Ibn Fadlan’s time) has been excavated.44 In fact, the practice of Islam does not seem to have made a very strong material imprint – in the form of Muslim-style burials – before the later years of the century. Indications of long-distance trading in valuable commodities are not lacking, most obviously the numerous dirhams found in the area of the confluence of the Volga and Kama rivers, where large settlements arose at Suwar and Biliar. But these seem only to have developed into towns with elaborate fortifications towards the middle of the tenth century.45 Much remains to be excavated, rendering arguments from silence the more hazardous. But the impression given by Ibn Fadlan, of itinerant Volga Bulgar elites and of pop-up markets rather than longstanding towns, seems to fit well enough with what archaeologists have uncovered so far.46 At the same time, one particular type of evidence serves to corroborate Ibn Fadlan’s remarks about the Volga Bulgars’ burgeoning commerce – taking in furtrading as the basic driver47 – and their incipient adoption of Islamic ways. Corroboration comes in the form of dirhams, especially the imitations that began to be struck on the Middle Volga a decade or so before Ibn Fadlan’s visit but not, it appears, much earlier.48 These imitations are very hard to decipher or date, as Marek Jankowiak shows. In part, this is because so many of their inscriptions are executed poorly, if not illiterately. But it is also because, for this period, they are modelled on the dirhams of the Samanids. So even if an imitation’s legend gives a date, this does not tell us the actual year of the coin’s production. What is clear, though, is that the imitations attest both the vitality of commerce driven by transactions in silver and that the Volga Bulgars looked to the Samanids for culturo-religious inspiration. This matches what Ibn Fadlan writes about his correction of the muezzin’s way of framing the call to Friday prayer. Although he does not spell it out, this followed current practice among the Samanids and other Muslims of Central Asia, rather than practice at the caliphal court. The imitations, then, provide a kind of illustration of the scene beside the Middle Volga that Ibn Fadlan presents. Our own presentation intermingles numismatic and other material evidence with textual scholarship and, from James Montgomery, a touch of autobiography. If there is a fair amount of cross-cutting from the detailed to the panoramic, and between the analytical and the descriptive, this recalls the techniques of Ibn Fadlan himself. Indeed, his sudden scene shifts, zooming in on details and recording conversations between opposites, are a standing invitation to film-makers – and might even be taken for fiction.
However, Ibn Fadlan’s text may gain credible contours when viewed in the context of more or less contemporaneous Arabic writings on the northern peoples and kindred topics,49 the caliphate’s political travails in Baghdad50 and, more broadly, the geopolitical and commercial developments unfolding in and around the Muslim commonwealth.51 Patterns and contours may, of course, exist solely in the eye of the beholder, perhaps entranced by Ibn Fadlan’s narrative skills. Nonetheless, the material culture of the various regions crossed and peoples encountered corresponds well enough with what he has to say.52
This goes even for newcomers like the Rus, whose adaptability to circumstances and multifaceted characteristics give rise to somewhat diverse interpretations of their nature and presence in the landmass between the Gulf of Finland, the Upper Volga and the Dnieper.53 Moreover, through considering the reports of travellers in the Latin west, one observes how some of them, too, sought to enhance credibility by telling of the wonders in the north they had seen or, in the case of the ‘dog-heads’, come tantalizingly close to.
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