ibn Fadlan's Journey. . . and so much more!

Ibn Fadlan's Journey to Russia: A Tenth-Century Traveler from Baghad to the Volga River by Ahmad ibn Fadlān

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I loved this book. Of course, I'm a huge fan of first-person accounts, but it's how this book is presented that makes me love it so much. The simple fact is much of what ibn Fadlan wrote about his voyage has been lost. So what we have is his writings, supplemented by a contemporary account, sandwich between essays on the time, the languages, trade, and even the coinage.

The mission of ibn Fadlan was to reach the king of the Bulgars to instruct him in Islam and hand over a small fortune so that kind could build a fortress. The money got held up due to politics, which endangered the entire mission. But it's ibn Fadlan's observations of the peoples and lands he traverses that make his report valuable. Knowing that the Khazars were led by a Jewish king, for example, and how various nations lived as seen first hand is the best way of learning, even if the observer was a humorless prude.

The essays on either side of ibn Fadlan's report make the book great. Understanding the roles of religious pressures, trade, how some Central Asian societies valued silver over gold, and the distribution of Sassanid over Byzantine artifacts reveals much about how trade developed in Central Asia not only gave contact to ibn Fadlan's mission but taught me a great deal about something I knew very little about before.

And that's the best measure of a history book, isn't it?



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