Writing Travel in Central Asian History

By Nile Green, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Ron Sela and 7 more

For centuries, travelers have made Central Asia known to the wider world through their writings. In this volume, scholars employ these little-known texts in a wide range of Asian and European languages to trace how Central Asia was gradually absorbed into global affairs. The representations of the region brought home to China and Japan, India and Persia, Russia and Great Britain, provide valuable evidence that helps map earlier periods of globalization and cultural interaction.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Release date: Jan 2, 2014
• ISBN: 9780253011480

Sanjay Subrahmanyam

Sanjay Subrahmanyam is Distinguished Professor of History at UCLA. His books include The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, Europe's India and Empires Between Islam and Christianity.

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HISTORY

Introduction

Writing, Travel, and the Global History of Central Asia

Nile Green

From a Silk Road to a Road of Texts

From the medieval Divisament dou monde of Marco Polo to the modernist prose of Robert Byron’s The Road to Oxiana, Central Asia has been made known to the wider world through the medium of travel writing.¹ At a time when Central Asia is increasingly drawn into global political affairs, such travel writings allow us to map the cultural dimensions of an earlier geopolitics that ranges from Qing Chinese empire builders to Russian missionaries and Japanese archaeologists. By reading the polyglottal prose written at the crossroads of Asia, the following chapters trace distinct stages of global connectivity by joining the early modern age of camel caravans and horsemen with the modern age of railroads and motorcars. Focusing on little-known travel writings of literary and ethnographic no less than historical interest, the chapters explore the different meanings given to Central Asia in the far corners of the world during the region’s most intensive periods of globalization between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries. By framing Central Asia as a cultural contact zone between different peoples and polities as much as a transit zone for material commodities such as silk, cotton, and oil, this book aims to connect Central Asia to the larger field of global history. The aim here is to add new layers to our understanding of both Central Asia and globalization, giving due recognition to the shifting politics and fluctuating trade patterns of the region but asking how these hard developments were inseparable from the cultural productions of the travelers who were globalization in human terms—and vice versa, for as we will see in the following chapters, neither the commerce nor politics of Central Asia can be fully understood in isolation from the travel accounts that so often formed the basis of mercantile and military action.

In laying out a general model, we can suggest a distinct informational profile for the travel writings on the region, a profile that is quite different from that of other historically inaccessible regions such as the islands of the South Pacific or the interior of Africa, conceived as they were in terms of the romantic imagination and the civilizing mission respectively. If this profile was not unique to Central Asian travel writings, then it was certainly emphatic in them. Except in certain expressions of Russian (or perhaps Japanese) Orientalism, Central Asia rarely appeared a place of imagination and enchantment (excepting, on its edges, Tibet), seldom as a perilously pestilent vector zone from which few returned alive, and never as an unspoiled Eden or New World populated by noble savages.² It is for this reason that the terminology used here is of travel writing rather than travel literature, with its suggestion of primarily aesthetic intentions, for self-consciously literary works form only a small proportion of the more robustly informational writings on the region. Given the range of languages and literatures brought together here, the term travel writing is used to define a broad category of texts—including visual texts—that emerged from acts of travel and often (but not always) described them. We are therefore speaking about a much wider body of writings than the singular genre of the travelogue and its equivalents in Asian literatures. And so the writings examined in this volume include merchant manuals and histories, ethnographies and autobiographies, archaeological reports and poetic notebooks as well as straightforward travelogues. In keeping with the informational profile that so many of these works have in common, it is worth drawing on Mary Campbell’s adage that the travel book is a kind of witness: it is generically aimed at the truth.³ For the purposes of this volume, we might qualify this statement by saying that travel writings aimed to communicate the truth about Central Asia as it related to the experiences of the people who traveled there and the needs of the societies (and economies and polities) for whom they wrote. To write travel was to make use of a key cultural technology that helped enable more concrete forms of global connection between Central Asia and the wider world. Whether enabling commerce, conquest, or conversion, travel writings laid the informational basis for subsequent interactions. In keeping with this logic of interaction between different peoples, knowledge orders, and state systems, the term Central Asia is defined broadly in this volume to refer to the vast stretch of the Eurasian landmass lying between the shifting and ill-defined borders of the early modern Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and Mughal Indian states. Despite its long history of state formation in its own right, the region can be conceived in conceptual if not literal terms as a vast borderland entered at different times by the diverse peoples of Eurasia and, in more recent times, beyond.⁴

Reflecting recent attempts to draw mobility and circulation into our understanding of the formation of apparently stationary nations or regions, this volume also aims to use travel writings to factor mobility and interaction into the making of Central Asia itself as the region opened to an incrementally global cast of actors.⁵ In terms of its human geography, Central Asia was not a geographical constant, and its accessibility to the persons who ventured there changed considerably over the long period surveyed in this introduction, most especially in the modern period when biological transport was suddenly and repeatedly replaced by train, automobile, and airplane travel. Between the early modern and modern periods in particular, this resulted in the opening of the region to a far wider diversity of travelers, whether in terms of class, profession, gender, or nationality. What we are facing, then, is a historical-geographical process, and the accounts discussed in the following chapters come from travelers who not only witnessed but were party to it. As we will see, this process of the opening of Central Asia led in turn to more varied literary representations of the region, which was transformed in the distant areas where those texts were received from primarily a commercial zone into an ethnological or archaeological goldfield, a musical soundscape, or a socialist utopia. Travel writing, then, both participated in and documented the larger transformations of historical geography, so connecting this volume’s culturalist approach to the more familiar framing of the region through commerce and geopolitics.

In this way, the chapters in this volume provide fine-grained studies of the concrete and discursive connections made between Central Asia and far distant regions of the world, connections that help us globalize the study of a region that is often relegated to the margins of world history.⁶ Just as Jonathan Bloom has reimagined the Silk Road as a Paper Road, and Philippe Forêt and Andreas Kaplony have traced the evolution of visual and cartographic representations of Central Asia, this volume goes a step further by documenting a process in cultural history by which Central Asia was transformed into a textual space that was understood through the various discursive models carried by travelers from across the world.⁷ Made up of variant languages and genres, shared assumptions and private idiosyncrasies, the travel writings under scrutiny here were the cultural traffic of what became a road of texts that eventually connected Central Asia with peoples as far away as Japan and the United States.

Historicizing Travel Writing in Central Asia: Three Periods

In order to locate the specific travelers and texts that are studied in the following chapters in the cultural dimensions of a longer process of globalization, the remainder of this introduction presents a structured survey of the development and diversification of travel writing about Central Asia. While the chapters focus on the lesser-studied later eras of travel in the region, this introductory essay presents a longue durée survey that places the chapters’ case studies into a lengthier and incremental process of global exchange. In order to chart the many byways of this road of texts, the following pages present a clear periodization: from antiquity to around 1500, from around 1500 to 1850, and from 1850 to 1940. Obviously, such a stark model is intended to suggest general patterns rather than absolute rules. Even so, each of these periods can be seen as having its particular features characterized by particular types of traveler and text. This is emphatically not to say that examples of one period’s defining travelers and genres cannot be found in other periods, but it is to propose that traveling writers of different periods emerged out of different social and intellectual backgrounds no less than their travel writings manifested changing concerns and epistemologies.

If this speaks to the shifts in travelers and their representations of Central Asia, then the usefulness of periodization is also in recognizing that, in terms of human geography, the space of Central Asia was itself repeatedly transformed over time. This reflects not only the shifting fortunes of commercial transit routes and indigenous production centers. It also reflects the changing accessibility of the region as the encroaching frontiers of expansive neighbors brought Central Asia closer to the populations of the Chinese, Russian, and British empires while developments in technology outside the region and of infrastructure within it afforded easier access through the railroads, roads, and airlines that replaced the preindustrial transport system of mules and camels. No longer only a silk road, the road of texts that we pursue here was sequentially fueled by straw, coal, and gasoline. These were the raw materials of travel writing that help us connect culture to commerce, the soft and hard factors of globalization.

It is important to bear in mind that while in large part overlapping with other models of periodization, what is proposed here are textual as much as historical periods, even if the history of these texts is shown to be linked to the wider pattern of Central Asia’s interactions with the world. Since the range of visitors in the long first period was far more limited than in the two shorter subsequent periods, the first period cannot properly be considered an age of globalization. For this reason, the book’s chapters deal with the second and third periods of travel writing for which it makes sense to speak of global rather than merely regional or, at best, Eurasian interactions. However, since these later periods cannot be understood in isolation, it is important to contextualize them in relation to what (and who) came before. The remainder of this introduction serves as a larger schematic survey of incrementally global interactions with Central Asia that were witnessed—and enabled—by the union of travel and writing. It is one of the contentions of this volume that in Central Asia as in other regions of the world, writing—and the variable efficiency of the distribution networks by which different texts were disseminated—served as one of the crucial technologies of globalization.

The first and longest period of Central Asian travel dates from antiquity to around 1500. This was the age of the region’s greatest inaccessibility, a product not only of its inherent physical geography but also of its enclosure by powerful buffer empires that themselves presented considerable social and political obstacles to travelers from beyond them. While a sequence of travelers from distant literate societies did reach the region in this period, the comparatively lower general literacy of the ancient and medieval periods meant that fewer travelers were writers, while the sheer passage of time has inevitably also contributed to the relative paucity of surviving writings. In this first period, travel was also more likely to be regional, exhibiting a general correlation: the earlier the date of the text, the more proximate to Central Asia its provenance. This correlation intersects with another general characteristic of the period: the farther away from Central Asia the writer’s origin, the less direct and reliable the information he recorded, as it was often passed on by several transmitters before being committed to writing. In other words, the pre-1500 period saw fewer travel writings that were the firsthand products of actual travelers. This is as true of the early Arabic and Persian accounts of Central Asia as of Greco-Roman geographies and arguably even the famous Marco Polo.

Long-distance travel was tremendously expensive and dangerous in this period, such that travelers required both the support of wealthy organizations and high levels of commitment. It is certainly true that there were distinct periods of greater connectivity, the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Pax Mongolica being the great example. But distant states were not often able to act as effective protectors, patrons, or organizers of travel in this first period, especially on their frontiers, while the fundamental logistics of land travel did not dramatically change between antiquity and the early modern period. Even taking into account the achievements of Central Asia’s medieval and late medieval states, the tribal zones outside of the cities remained dangerously outside state control until the late nineteenth century.

As a result of these dangers, two of the most characteristic forms of travel writing to emerge from this first period are mercantile and religious texts based on expeditions that drew on the material resources, prestige, and customs of safe passage provided to representatives of collective merchant investment or religious organizations. Even when not concerned with the practical or proselytizing dimensions of trade and religion, travel writings from the period frame the region in religious terms through attempting to relate it to the geographies of the Scriptures or the biographies of the holy.⁸ Out of these religious and mercantile concerns (and in turn conceptions) of the region appeared the third major type of travel writing from the period, that which emerged from diplomatic negotiations, for such exchanges were often entrusted to the religious figures or merchants seen as having the requisite prestige, inviolability, and connections.

Dating between around 1500 and 1850, Central Asia’s second period of travel writing did not see substantial easing in the logistics of travel by way of any lessening of the physical inaccessibility or costs of reaching the region. But it did see, firstly, the appearance of more varied and complex organizations that supported travel and, secondly, the emergence of more effective and reliable forms of collecting and disseminating knowledge. These were in part the result of the new states that appeared in and around the region, by way of the Safavid, Mughal, and Shaybanid polities whose rise roughly coincides with the opening of the period; the Ming and Qing empires that between them endured throughout this period; and the Russian and British Indian states that drew closer to Central Asia through the eighteenth and the first half of the nineteenth century. The typical characteristics of early modernity allow us to separate this period from the much longer first period of Central Asian travel in order to point to interactions that we can more credibly recognize as global in scale and scope. Even so, this was not yet the full-blown era of globalization that was heralded by imperial conquest and mechanized travel in the third period discussed below. Nonetheless, there was much that was new. An early modern infrastructure of travel emerged through the support of both mercantile and state sponsors by way of such merchant companies as the British Muscovy Company (chartered in 1555) and new learned societies such as the Saint Petersburg (and later Imperial) Academy of Sciences (founded in 1724). This second period also saw Asian merchant networks—particularly those based in India—become more efficient and organized sponsors of regularized travel, though we still know relatively little about their written forms of information gathering.⁹

Many other travel sponsors also emerged in this second period, with early modern states playing a gradually increasing role. For whether in Beijing or Saint Petersburg, bureaucratic cadres and learned societies were appendages of increasingly efficient imperial states that were keen to promote utilizable knowledge of physical and human geography. The result was that new types of traveler and of travel writing made their appearance, what Jaś Elsner and Joan-Pau Rubiés have called the empirical traveller with his new authoritative discourse on human geography.¹⁰ If merchants did not disappear between 1500 and 1850, then the regularizing of the maritime routes to China certainly cut away Central Asia’s old role as a transit route between China and Europe, even as this prompted British and especially Russian merchants to report on the commercial produce of the region itself. But it was the new scientific traveler and the more deliberately observational and quantifiable methods of knowledge collection that introduced the period’s most important innovation to travel writing, albeit seen in different discursive expressions in Chinese and Persian no less than Russian and German writings from the time. The Chinese conquest of Xinjiang (New Territory) in 1759 under the Qing and the Russian foundation of Orenburg in 1734 and the series of frontier fortresses that encroached on the Kazakh steppes brought Central Asia closer to the expanding populations and intellectuals of these formerly distant states. As we have already noted, the new types of traveler and text were often connected to both the expansion of new empires and the retraction of older ones in the areas surrounding Central Asia, lending a distinctly imperial cast to many writings of the period that was quite dissimilar from the sponsorship of nonstate mercantile and religious entities in the previous centuries. Even so, the steppe road of this period remained a rough and dangerous sequence of routes along which the danger of being kidnapped into slavery loomed large well into the nineteenth century.

The third period of travel stretched between around 1850 and 1940, its curtailment with the closing of the Chinese and Soviet borders showing that globalization is never an automatic or unstoppable process. The dating parameters here are marked by two interdependent transformations that greatly affected travel in and out of Central Asia: the Russian colonization of western Central Asia and the region’s subsequent connection to the European rail network. From the 1860s, with the reassertion of Chinese rule in the eastern regions of Central Asia, the political and, with it, the social and urban geography of the remainder of Central Asia was also transformed. In both cases, independent Muslim rule came to an end. The contingent nature of these expansions brought with it a flurry of new types of political traveler, the spies and surveyors whose writings form the textual contributions of the Great Game, whose writings were as likely to be in Persian and Urdu as in Russian and English. Yet this era of imperial annexation of Central Asia brought with it not only expressly political travel writings but also the new genres of exploratory, ethnographic, and archaeological travel writings, which, if inseparable from empire, were at least distinct from the political reports of the Great Game. In many cases, the new scholarly travelers writing such texts were not themselves imperial citizens, but taking advantage of the easier access and (for Europeans at least) stability of the area to travel in pursuit of genuinely scientific and artistic concerns. In addition to the political and archaeo-exploratory texts, the final new body of writings to emerge in this last period is that of the journalistic and even touristic traveler, for the expansion of the Trans-Caspian Railway, and from the 1920s the appearance of motorable roads and then airports in Central Asia, led to the most rapid of all openings of the region to new social and professional types of traveler, from the journalist to the rally driver.

Then, in the 1930s and 1940s, what had been for centuries porous frontiers were rapidly subjected to unprecedented levels of control by the Soviet and then Chinese Communist authorities.¹¹ The incremental expansion of global exchanges that had greatly expanded since the coming of the railroad half a century earlier entered a rapid reversal as the more closely defined borders that had been mapped by 1900 were transformed into concrete and militarized boundaries. The chapters in this volume observe this date of around 1940, which signals not only the substantial closing of Central Asia to global traffic but also the entry of the totalitarian state as the primary agent of mobility. The mass deportations of Tatars, Koreans, and many others that marked this new period, and whatever writings survive from them, must await their own volume. With this end point in mind, we can now turn toward the three periods in more detail, to examine some representative examples of the forms of travel and writing that connected Central Asia to the wider world.

Monkish Diplomats and Unreliable Geographers (Antiquity to c. 1500)

The earliest surviving European accounts of Central Asia were those written by often semi-legendary Greek writers such as Aristeas of Proconnesus (fl. 7th century BCE), whose now lost travel poem Arimaspea, was quoted by many later writers in antiquity.¹² Despite his own extensive travels in Egypt, the historian Herodotus (d. c. 425 BCE) relied for his knowledge of Central Asia on other travelers, and it was mainly through the histories written in the wake of Alexander’s conquests that Central Asia entered the Graeco-Roman imagination, particularly through book 4 of Arrian’s Anabasis Alexandrou.¹³ Despite brief mentions of Turkic peoples by the Byzantine historian Theophylact Simocatta, by the late antique period the contacts forged in the Hellenic era had been lost and knowledge of Central Asia appeared in the form of the hagiographical travel accounts of Philostratus’s Vita Apollonii.¹⁴ It was, however, during late antiquity that one of the most enduring institutional supports and motivations of Central Asian travel writing were to emerge through the missionary activities of the Christian church. Given the sheer range of culture areas through which Christianity expanded in late antiquity, accounts of church founding and missionary journeys appeared in a variety of languages, including such Asian languages as Syriac.¹⁵

However, it was in Chinese that the most extensive and accurate early medieval travel account of Central Asia was written as a result of the travels of the Buddhist monk Xuanzang (Hsüan-tsang, c. 602–664), who, in his motivating search for manuscripts, echoed the religious profile of many other writing travelers in this first period.¹⁶ Setting off in 629, Xuanzang spent the next fifteen years traveling west through Central Asia and then south across the Hindu Kush into India, reaching as far south as the Pallava capital at Kanchipuram in south India. Along the way, he stayed at the numerous Buddhist monasteries that lined the roads through Central Asia, most notably at Turfan, Kucha, and Bamiyan, so pointing to the importance of religious institutions in providing the practical wherewithal for travel in this period. This pattern would be repeated after the region’s Islamization in the ways in which Sufi shrines and khanaqah monasteries provided the staging posts for later medieval travelers. Even so, Xuanzang’s lifetime coincided with the Central Asian conquests and embassies of the Tang dynasty (618–907), developments that led to a fascination with Central Asian exotica among the Tang elite.¹⁷ As a result, the Da Tang Xiyu Ji (Great Tang Dynasty Record of the Western Regions), Xuanzang’s extraordinarily detailed account of what he had seen on his travels, was only one of a series of Chinese travel accounts to be written in this period.¹⁸ Others were written by fellow monks, such as Huichao’s Wang Wu Tianzhuguo Zhuan (Record on the Five Indian Kingdoms,) of around 740, some of whom served as imperial agents, such as the monk and ambassador to Samarqand, Wukong (fl. 750–89), a pattern we will see again with regard to Christian monastic emissaries. Combined with the eleventh-century Song dynasty reports on the Liao/Khitan empire, such encounters created in Chinese what was by far the most detailed and accurate medieval body of writing on Central Asia.¹⁹

In the thirteenth century, the Mongol conquests and subsequent Pax Mongolica enabled a rapid expansion of contact between Europe, China, and the Middle East, with Central Asia in between. Among medieval European accounts of Central Asia from this period, it is the travels of merchants such as the Polo family that are the best known.²⁰ As seen in the long debates on whether the sources of Marco Polo’s information drew on direct observation or oral mercantile lore, the information circuits of medieval traders were more often spoken than written. But the thirteenth century also saw the rise of what G. F. Hudson termed a "religious Weltpolitik," and, based as it was on literate and mobile monks, it was the religious profile of Weltpolitik that brought the largest expansion of European travel writings on Central Asia.²¹ The most important Latinate emissaries were the Italian Franciscan monk Giovanni do Plan di Carpini (John of Plano Carpini, 1182/85–1252), who undertook a journey through Central Asia to the Mongol court between 1245 and 1247, and the Flemish Franciscan Willem van Ruysbroeck (William of Rubruck, c. 1220–c. 1293), who made a similar journey between 1253 and 1255.²² Plan di Carpini’s Ystoria Mongalorum (History of the Mongols) and van Ruysbroeck’s Itinerarium (Itinerary) were both histories in the medieval Latin sense, attempting to provide reliable data on both the past and the present of the peoples and regions the authors had encountered on their journeys. If the Itinerarium did contain more first-person narrative than the Ystoria Mongalorum, then this was incidental to the writers’ common aim of using travel and writing to supply reliable strategic information to their royal and ecclesiastical sponsors. Yet even as both books were written in Latin, their writers drew on a sequence of interpreters who afforded them access to the multilingual spaces of Central Asia, and while these polyglot voices were largely subsumed in the final texts, the genealogy of both the Itinerarium and the Ystoria Mongalorum positions them as multivocal products of the Central Asian road of texts.²³

The same might be said in a different way of such histories of the Mongols as La Flor des estoires d’orient (Flowers of the Stories of the East) by the itinerant Armenian noble Hethum (Hayton of Corycus, d. c. 1320), which was translated into medieval French, Latin, English, and Castilian.²⁴ While the larger number were written in either Latin or its Romance vernaculars, other accounts of Central Asia appeared in Syriac, such as the autobiographical history of the Nestorian monk and diplomat Bar Sawma (c. 1220–1294), who was himself probably of Turkic Uighur origin and acted as a mediator between the Mongols and Franks in an attempt to forge an alliance against the Mamluks.²⁵ In the same period, Kirakos Kaidzekatski (c. 1202–1271) wrote an Armenian travel account of the embassy of the Armenian King Hethum I of Cilicia (r. 1226–70) to the Mongols.²⁶ Approaching the Mongol court from the other direction were Chinese emissaries, such as the Taoist monk Qiu Chuji (1148–1227), whose Qiu Changchun Xiyou Ji (Travels to the West of Qiu Changchun) was published in block print, so marking the transition of Central Asian travel writings into print.²⁷ In 1259, another Chinese scholar, Chang De, was dispatched on behalf of the Mongol ruler Möngke (r. 1251–59) and recorded his journey in another of the several Chinese travelogues of the period.²⁸ There was then a whole series of monkish diplomats involved in what before the discovery of the Americas was indeed a Weltpolitik. But this was more than a question of politics. It was also a question of knowledge or what Samuel Adshead conceptualized as the expansion of the basic information circuit under the Pax Mongolica. According to Adshead, this expansion brought about an integration of information, so that . . . a unified picture of a single world was assembled.²⁹ Through the informational profile of the writings that came out of Central Asian travel in the Mongol era, there emerged a unified conceptualization of the world, with the geographies, histories and cultures of the parts coordinated with each other.³⁰ But like all globalizations, this Mongol version was fragile and reversible. While it did hand down a legacy of information to subsequent periods, the exchanges—particularly with Europe—would have to be made over in later centuries.

A number of similarities with the European works appear in the Arabic and Persian travel writings of this long first period. As in the Christian West, the region was at times conceived in terms of scriptural geographies, not least of lands bordered by the wall of Gog and Magog (sadd Yajuj wa Majuj).³¹ There was also the recognition of the importance of the region’s slave trade, which by at least the twelfth century was responsible for relocating large numbers of Central Asian peoples into the Muslim-ruled polities of northern India.³² However, in the Middle East as in Europe, scriptural and moralistic conceptions of Central Asia lived alongside more empirical sources of information, and the earliest Arabic and Persian texts expressly devoted to the region comprised geographical and historical works that drew on information passed on by actual travelers.³³ Among the earliest proper travel accounts was that of Tamim ibn Bahr, who in 821 was sent as ambassador to the Uighur Turks and brought back information on the travel routes, horse armies, and tent dwellers of the steppe.³⁴ Once again, the purposes of many of these early Muslim works were expressly practical, whether with regard to knowledge of trade routes, as in the Arabic Kitab al-Masalik wa’l Mamalik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms) of Abu’l Qasim ‘Ubaydullah ibn Khordadbeh (c. 820–912), or more general geopolitical information, as in the Persian Hudud al-‘Alam (Limits of the World).³⁵

The most important early Arabic travelogue as such on the region was that of Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who in 921 was sent from Baghdad as the ‘Abbasid ambassador to the Volga Bulgars.³⁶ Although related to the western Central Asian regions that would later be absorbed by Muscovy, Ibn Fadlan’s account brought back a wealth of information on the unknown Turkic and Rus peoples whom the ‘Abbasids were then seeking to bring under their own suzerainty. Richly informative as his travel report was on the customs and practices of these unknown peoples, for Ibn Fadlan the western steppes formed a zone of radical alterity that lay beyond the known spheres of either Islamdom or Christendom.

Ibn Fadlan’s focus on the peoples rather than the physical spaces of Central Asia was common to most early Arabic accounts of the region, with writers such as Jahiz (781–868) in his Risala fi Manaqib al-Turk (Treatise on the Qualities of the Turks) focusing on what they saw as the displeasing habits of the Turkic peoples.³⁷ This was a quite different conception of the region than that found in the accounts of later Arabic and Persian writers, to whom the gradually converted peoples of Central Asia presented the common legal and ritual idioms of Islam, with urban pockets of Judaism. If little is known of the biography of Ibn Fadlan, we know more about the writer of the most important medieval Arabic travel account of Central Asia, the illustrious Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69), who included a long section on the region in his Tuhfat al-Nuzzar fi Ghara’ib al-Amsar wa ‘Aja’ib al-Asfar (Gift to the Contemplators on the Strangeness of Cities and the Marvels of Travel).³⁸ Like his Christian contemporaries, Ibn Battuta straddled the realms of religious professional and diplomat, using his credentials as a scholar of Islamic law to pick up a sequence of diplomatic positions such as accompanying the Byzantine royal wife of Uzbeg Khan, the khan of the Golden Horde, back to Constantinople as a means of safely leaving the steppe. Even so, in its composition, Ibn Battuta’s travelogue has more in common with Marco Polo’s Divisament dou monde in that it was composed only on his return to Morocco at the end of his decades of travel and not written by himself but dictated to the local scholar Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi (1321–1357). Writings were rarely made in the field during these centuries, presumably in part as a consequence of the expense and rarity of paper, as well as its sheer weight for those who could not afford pack animals. As with regard to the Greek and Christian traditions, other travel accounts were preserved in Persian hagiographical works that describe various Sufis treading the migration routes between Central Asia and India, not least those between the towns of north India and the early Sufi center of Ush.³⁹ For Muslims dwelling in the Mediterranean west or the Indian south, through a long