110 chapter three
shadows,” source of all the best-quality furs and pelts217 and then rejoined
the khan’s retinue, with whom he travelled onward to astrakhan.
ibn Baṭṭūṭa gives the name of the city on the mouth of the volga as
Al-Hajj Tarkhān: it benefitted from the khan’s exemption from all taxes—
the author explains helpfully that tarkhān means just this, a place exempt
from taxes, in turkish—so that the little market grew and prospered until
it had become a very beautiful town with considerable markets. caravans
arrived here, and even crossed over to the other side of the river when it
was frozen.218
after three days’ travel along the volga, ibn Baṭṭūṭa arrived at sarai
(al-Sarā), “called sarai-Berke,” in the midst of a densely settled plain. to
walk the length of the city would take from morning until lunchtime,
although it only took half the time to walk its breadth. the streets are
wide, the houses jammed up tightly together with no room for gardens
or empty lots in between them. mosques, large and small, are numerous.
sarai’s inhabitants are from various stock: local mongols, the lords of the
country, some of them muslims, muslim alans, cumans, circassians, rus-
sians, greeks, all of these christian. each group lives in a separate quar-
ter, where they have their markets. foreigners from iraq, egypt, syria and
elsewhere live in a walled quarter where the merchants’ goods are well-
defended. the khan’s palace is also in the town.219
Between sarai-Berke and the city of ‘Khwarezm,’ meaning Urgench, is
a desert, which can be crossed in forty days but only by camel, not with
horses, because water is so scarce.220
as a traveller with direct and immediate knowledge of the lands of the
golden horde, ibn Baṭṭūṭa furnishes details that agree with and support
pegolotti’s information. the draught animals were horses, oxen and cam-
els, setting off in caravan according to a strictly observed daily timetable.
the merchants rented wagons from the cumans.221
217 ibid., pp. 398–402; Bulghār is on the Kama, a tributary of the volga, and in the mon-
gols’ time the place-name gave way to Kazan; see pegolotti/evans, p. 414: “Bolgari, ‘Bul-
garian vair’, included in the list of vairs, the term is clearly geographical, cf. vai organini,
volgari, capaneri, o d’altra parte.”
218 ibn Baṭṭūṭa/defrémery, sanguinetti, ii, pp. 410–411; it is hard to say whether astra-
khan really did enjoy tax exemption in Özbek’s time or whether this is a little etymological
indulgence on the arab traveller’s part.
219 ibid., pp. 447–448; the locals were of course not mongols as such but cumans.
220 ibid., pp. 450–451.
221 ibid., pp. 357–459, 361–464; the arab gives the cuman name of these vehicles, with
“four great wheels” and used everywhere in the crimea and the cuman steppe, as ‘araba,