Mission to the Volga - Ahmad Ibn Fadlan Library of Arabic Literature

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Mūsā. He wrote to the deputies of the superintendent of the Khurasan highway, in the military district of Sarakhs-Baykand, as follows: “Tell your spies to keep a lookout for Aḥmad ibn Mūsā in the caravanserais and the lookout posts. Enclosed is his description. The man who catches him is to detain him until we specify the punishment in writing.” Aḥmad ibn Mūsā was later arrested in Marw and put in chains. We stayed twenty-eight days in Bukhara. ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū and other members of our party kept saying, “If we tarry, the winter onslaught will mean we will miss the crossing. Aḥmad ibn Mūsā will catch up with us and will join us.” Al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā encouraged this.

      7 Ibn Faḍlān said: I noticed in Bukhara that the dirhams were 7 made of different colored metals. One of them, the ghiṭrīfī dirham, is made of red and yellow brass. It is accepted according to numerical value rather than weight: one hundred ghiṭrīfī dirhams equals one silver dirham. In the dowries for their womenfolk they make the following stipulations: so-and-so, the son of so-and-so, marries so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so, for so many thousand ghiṭrīfī dirhams. This also applies to the purchase of property and the purchase of slaves—they specifically mention ghiṭrīfī dirhams. They have other dirhams, made only of yellow brass, forty of which equal one dānaq, and a further type of yellow-brass dirham called the samarqandī, six of which equal one dānaq.

      8 I listened to the warnings of ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū and the others about the onslaught of winter. We left Bukhara and returned to the river, where we hired a boat for Khwārazm, more than two hundred farsakhs from where we hired the boat. We were able to travel only part of the day. A whole day’s travel was impossible because of the cold. When we got to Khwārazm, we were given an audience with the emir, Muḥammad ibn ʿIrāq Khwārazm-Shāh, who gave us a warm and hospitable reception and a place to stay. Three days later, he summoned us, quizzing us about wanting to enter the realm of the Turks. “I cannot let you do that,” he said. “I am not permitted to let you risk your lives. I think all this is a ploy devised by this soldier.” (He meant Takīn.)8 “He used to live here as a blacksmith, when he ran the iron trade in the land of the infidels. He is the one who beguiled Nadhīr and got him to speak to the Commander of the Faithful and to bring the letter of the king of the Ṣaqālibah to him. The exalted emir,” (he meant the emir of Khurasan) “has more right to have the name of the Commander of the Faithful proclaimed out there, if only he could find a safe way to do it.9 And then there are a thousand infidel tribes in your path. This is clearly an imposture foisted upon the caliph. Such is my counsel. I now have no recourse but to write to the exalted emir, so that he can write to the caliph (God give him strength!) and consult with him. You will remain here until the answer comes.” We left things at that but came back later and pressured him. “We have the orders and the letter of the Commander of the Faithful, so why do you need to consult?” we said. In the end, he granted us permission and we sailed downriver from Khwārazm to al-Jurjāniyyah. The distance by water is fifty farsakhs.

      9 I noticed that the dirhams in Khwārazm are adulterated and should not be accepted, because they are made of lead and brass. They call their dirham a ṭāzijah. It weighs four and a half dānaqs. The money changers trade in sheep bones, spinning tops, and dirhams. They are the strangest of people in the way they talk and behave. When they talk they sound just like starlings calling. There is a village one day away called Ardkwā, whose inhabitants are called al-Kardaliyyah. When they talk they sound just like frogs croaking. At the end of the prayer they disavow the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, God be pleased with him.

      10 We stayed several days in al-Jurjāniyyah. The River Jayḥūn froze over completely, from beginning to end. The ice was seventeen spans thick. Horses, mules, donkeys, and carts used it like a road and it did not move—it did not even creak. It stayed like this for three months. We thought the country we were visiting was an «infernally cold»10 portal to the depths of Hell. When snow fell, it was accompanied by a wild, howling blizzard.

      11 When people here want to honor each other and be generous they say, “Come to my house so we can talk, for I have a good fire burning.” This is their custom for expressing genuine generosity and affability. God the exalted has been kind to them by making firewood plentiful and very cheap: a cart load of ṭāgh wood costs only two local dirhams, and their carts can hold about three thousand raṭls. Normally, their beggars do not stand outside at the door but go into the house, sit for a while, and get warm by the fire. Then they say, “Bakand” meaning “bread.”

      12 We were in al-Jurjāniyyah for a long time: several days of Rajab and all of Shaʿban, Ramadan, and Shawwal.11 We stayed there so long because the cold was so severe. Indeed, I was told that two men had driven twelve camels to transport a load of firewood from a particular forest but had forgotten to take their flint and tinderbox and passed the night without a fire. In the morning it was so cold that they had frozen to death, as had their camels. The weather was so cold that you could wander round the markets and through the streets and not meet anyone. I would leave the baths, and, by the time I got home, I would look at my beard and see a block of ice. I would have to thaw it at the fire. I would sleep inside a chamber, inside another chamber,12 with a Turkish yurt of animal skins inside it, and would be smothered in cloaks and pelts, and even then my cheek would sometimes freeze and stick to the pillow. I noticed containers wrapped in sheepskins, to stop them shattering and breaking, but this did them no good at all. I even saw the ground open up into great rifts and mighty, ancient trees split in two because of the cold.

      13 Halfway into Shawwal of 309 [February, 922], the season began to change and the Jayḥūn melted. We set about acquiring the items we needed for our journey. We purchased Turkish camels, constructed the camel-skin rafts for crossing all the rivers we had to cross in the realm of the Turks, and packed provisions of bread, millet, and cured meat to last three months. The locals who knew us told us in no uncertain terms to wear proper clothing outdoors and to wear a lot of it. They gave us a terrifying description of the cold and impressed upon us the need to take the matter very, very seriously. But when we experienced it ourselves, it was so much worse than what they had described, even though we each wore a tunic, a caftan, a sheepskin, a horse blanket, and a burnoose with only our eyes showing, a pair of trousers, another pair of lined trousers, leggings, and a pair of animal skin boots with yet another pair on top of them. Mounted on our camels, we wore so many heavy clothes we couldn’t move. The jurist, the instructor, and the retainers who had left the City of Peace with us stayed behind, too scared to enter the realm of the Turks. I pushed on with the envoy, his brother-in-law, and the two soldiers, Takīn and Bārs.13

      14 On the day we planned to set off, I said to them, “The king’s 14 man accompanies you. He knows everything. And you carry the letters of the caliph. They must surely mention the four thousand musayyabī dinars intended for the king. You will be at the court of a non-Arab king, and he will demand that you pay this sum.” “Don’t worry about it,” they replied, “he will not ask us for them.” “He will demand that you produce them. I know it,” I warned. But they paid no heed. The caravan was ready to depart, so we hired a guide called Falūs, an inhabitant of al-Jurjāniyyah. We trusted in almighty God, putting our fate in His hands.

      15 We left al-Jurjāniyyah on Monday, the second of Dhu l-Qaʿdah, 309 [Monday, March 4, 922], and stopped at an outpost called Zamjān, the Gate of the Turks. The following morning we traveled as far as a stopping post called Jīt. The snow had fallen so heavily that it came up to the camels’ knees. We had to stay there two days. Then we kept a straight course and plunged deep into the realm of the Turks through a barren, mountainless desert. We met no one. We crossed for ten days. Our bodies suffered terrible injuries. We were exhausted. The cold was biting, the snowstorms never-ending. It made the cold of Khwārazm seem like summertime. We forgot all about our previous sufferings and were ready to give up the ghost.

      16 One

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