The Vinland Sagas: The Greenlanders’ Saga and Eirik the Red’s Saga

Beginning with the Vinland Sagas and Nordic journeying from eastern Greenland across the Atlantic to North America highlights an important focal question: Why did premodern peoples travel, given the extreme hazards and sometimes near-impossibilities of long-distance journeying? Student responses, partly conditioned by Hollywood and television, will include: a desire for exploration, a love of adventure and discovery, and “because it’s there.”

According to the Sagas, however, the motives of the would-be settler-colonists in “Vinland” – North American regions believed to be somewhere in New Brunswick, around the Gulf of Saint Lawrence and the Miramichi River, though excavation has thus far only unearthed the settlers’ gateway or staging post at L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland – involve resource extraction.Footnote ³⁶ While a mix of reasons may have prompted the journeys – from characteristic patterns of Nordic settler-colonization, to individual and communal impulses – the Sagas usefully establish the profit motive as an impelling prompt.

The Sagas depict a North America around 1000 CE teeming with rich natural resources: timber from tall trees absent in Greenland and essential for boatbuilding and homesteads; wild grapes for making wine, a high-value prestige product usually requiring importation from the Mediterranean; “wild wheat” (a kind of rye?) growing unbidden, without the need for cultivation; fish fat in tidal pools when the tide went out; and a climate so mild in Vinland’s southern outpost, even in winter, that livestock could conveniently be kept outdoors (56–57, 65, 95, 98).Footnote ³⁷

In addition to the land’s Edenic natural resources, the Sagas also relate how the Indigenous peoples of North America proffer valuable furs and pelts in trade for what the settlers extend – sips of milk, or strips of red cloth (65, 99). Accordingly, the Greenlanders’ Saga (henceforth, GS) shows Thorfinn Karlsefni, co-leader of the most prominent North American expedition, growing wealthy from his Vinland enterprise. Disembarking in Norway after departing Vinland, Karlsefni unloads and sells his furs, pelts, and other Vinland treasures – including a ship’s figurehead carved from North American wood – for a small fortune, thereafter buying a farm and homestead in Iceland where his and his wife’s descendants (which include three bishops) live for generations thereafter.Footnote ³⁸

The profit motive, students begin to see, is a theme that runs through global texts. While humans may indeed desire adventure and exploration, profit is a reliable instigator of trans-world journeying, despite all hazards and risks. The Sagas also introduce the idea that what is considered valuable, and constitutes wealth, assumes different forms in different places. Timber and grapes (and wine made from grapes) are not palpably forms of wealth in students’ lives today, though these are animating attractions for the earliest visits to the North American continent. Students may find imagining a world where lumber is scarce a worthwhile thought experiment.

Beginning a global literature course with the Vinland Sagas also at once raises the paramount role of climate and atmospheric phenomena in shaping early globalism. In the eleventh century, a period of global warming dubbed the Little Climatic Optimum, the Medieval Climate Anomaly, or the Medieval Warm Period (among other names) increased the temperature in circumpolar regions by a few degrees, thereby enabling the Atlantic to be traversable in summer months.Footnote ³⁹

Students may notice on their own that even after the settler-colonists are routed by native Indigenous populations in pitched battles, and decide to abandon their settlements, the Sagas show they do not leave till summer arrives, but merely hunker down in their more northerly camp, where no Indigenous are ever encountered, till the weather allows for departure.

They should also be told that Greenland, from which the European settler-colonists sailed, would itself be abandoned during the Little Ice Age that arrived in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, leaving Greenland habitable only by the Inuit, whose lifestyles were adaptable to late-medieval climate change. Climate change is an issue close to students’ minds, as their generation inherits the Anthropocene created by earlier generations and ours, and the Sagas bring home the impact of climate on human lives.

Indeed, students will encounter the impact of climate and atmospheric conditions again and again in the semester’s readings. Journeying from the Abbasid Caliphate up the Volga, the Arab emissary Ibn Fadlan is taken aback by how his beard freezes in the cold after his bath, and how layers of clothing necessary for warmth obstruct his being able to move on his mount. But while atmospheric conditions pose challenges, they can also awe: The aurora borealis is a marvel Ibn Fadlan beholds, an extraordinary spectacle to be experienced in a lifetime.

In other texts, students will see how the weather phenomenon of winds known as the monsoons (from Arabic, mawsim, “season”) decides in which direction a ship can sail across the Indian Ocean and South China Sea, and during which months of the year. Diplomats, merchants, and sailors are stranded in ports, awaiting the right winds to blow from the right direction, before they can complete their missions and enterprises. The impact of climate and weather upon human ambitions and human activity is a repeating, sometimes sobering lesson.Footnote ⁴⁰

Crises and exigencies that arise are shown to elicit a range of human responses. In premodernity, many responses involve explanations issuing from religious faith, especially among people espousing the Abrahamic confessions. In the Sagas, clashes between Christian and “pagan” viewpoints furnish opportunities to discuss the spread of global religions like Christianity, and how the arrival of a global religion changes local behavior, but also meets with resistance.

Eirik the Red’s Saga (henceforth, ESR) has an episode of hunger in Vinland where those who follow Thorhall the Hunter and eat the flesh of a “whale” that washes ashore at the northerly outpost of Straumfjord – a food source Thorhall glosses as a reward from the Norse god Thor – fall violently ill. Those who abstain from eating the animal and pray to Christ instead are rewarded with good weather and good fishing soon afterward (95–96). Christianity wins, here and elsewhere in the Sagas, as a new global religion is shown successfully to displace older faith traditions.

But ESR also describes a famine in Greenland, and how a sorceress, Thorbjorg, is invited to Herjolfsness to prophesy the future to anxious homesteaders. Treated with great deference, her outlandish appearance and demands meet with no hint of criticism, and even possibly a touch of awe. When the sorceress calls for old warlock songs to be sung, an opportunity is created to demonstrate possession of deep pagan knowledge by Gudrid Thorbjarnardóttir, Karlsefni’s important wife-to-be, yet also Gudrid’s strong commitment to Christianity, signaled by her initial refusal to perform the songs. Eventually, after singing the warlock songs beautifully, Gudrid is rewarded with sorcerous prophecy of an eminent lineage to issue from her (81–83).

Students quickly see Gudrid’s consent to performing old pagan songs, despite her initial reluctance, as essential to her characterization as someone who is the ideal woman in her society – a good Christian reluctant to perform forbidden pagan knowledge, but whose commitment to hospitality and civility is overriding, and ultimately allows her to behave like a wise woman bestriding old and new worlds, possessing wisdom in both.

Gudrid’s role in the Sagas thus offers an opportunity to begin a discussion thread on the roles of women in early global texts. Both GS and ESR highlight episodes where male settler-colonists, on encountering the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, gratuitously kill them, cheat them, and commit various kinds of violence. I discuss these episodes in detail in Invention of Race (chapter 5), and will refrain from rehearsing the discussion here, except to say that these episodes form prime examples of a racializing dynamic seen to occur in early global texts when members of one civilization encounter members of another civilization who seem wholly foreign to them.

Native North Americans are presented in the Sagas as primitive peoples fascinated with the superior metal technology of the expeditioners’ weapons, and as naifs ignorant of the value of their furs and pelts in the international circuits of commerce to which the expeditioners have access. The racialization of Indigenous peoples thus turns not only on their physical appearance – facial features, hair, coloring, clothing – but also on the assumption that the Indigenous are located relatively low on a socio-evolutionary ladder of civilizational maturity. (That the expeditioners are nonetheless routed by the natives in pitched battles is an embarrassment the Sagas do not address.)

Themes of comparative civilizational maturity are introduced again and again in texts of global encounter. The Sagas usefully lend themselves to addressing this thematic early in the semester.

Revealingly, an episode in GS featuring Gudrid serves up a counterexample to the masculine violence on display in the Sagas: Gudrid is sitting by the door of her home, peaceably rocking her new infant son Snorri in his cradle, when a Native woman appears in the doorway. Gudrid, who has been described as not only beautiful but also intelligent, and someone who knows well how to behave, asks the Native woman for her name; says her own name first; and, when the Indigenous woman echoes her words, hospitably gestures to her visitor to come and sit down beside her.Footnote ⁴¹

The tranquil domestic scene ends abruptly, however, when a loud crash occurs outside (predictably, one of Karlsefni’s men has killed a native), and the woman promptly vanishes.

Here, it’s worth asking students: After generations of cultural transmission through which communal memories of the Vinland expeditions were narrated before they were set down in writing, who would have wanted an episode like this to exist, and why? What is accomplished, when a counterpoint to masculine bellicosity is created with a domestic setting in a woman’s home, with a mother rocking her baby? We can have students consider how women are made to carry symbolic significance for a society, including today – whether the symbolism is of a mother with an infant, or a woman wearing hijab, or a woman sporting battle fatigues.

The Sagas do not, however, essentialize women as peacemakers and consistently unlike violent men. GS portrays a sanguinary, murderous woman, Freydis – Leif Erickson’s (half?) sister – and ESR has a Valkyrie-like, pregnant Freydis terrify Native Americans by beating a naked sword against her bared breast. Often, students are quick to see that the portrayal of a bellicose Freydis is likely a foil for an idealized Gudrid, with both women lessoning us as to what women should, and should not, be for their societies.

Yet the episode staging two women from vastly different worlds – one Christian and representing the Latin West, the other presumably “pagan” and representing Native North America – who meet in the domestic setting of a woman’s home, with an infant close by, memorably remains. I suggest the episode can be offered to students as a narrative attempt – of however limited or fleeting a kind – to imagine a bridge across difference.

We should not exaggerate the success of this narrative attempt, of course. For instance, no Native tongue or speech is ever heard – Gudrid’s words only function as a kind of echo chamber, as the Indigenous woman repeats Gudrid’s words back to her, trying out the Norse syllables on her tongue. The sudden conclusion to the episode, moreover, truncated by male violence rearing its head once again, also does not portend a happy outcome for Europe’s encounters with Native North America.

But I work hard to find and help students see the possibility – even if it exists merely as a shadow, or a hint – of bridges across difference being imagined, perhaps as a thought experiment, within a text. While we aim to teach students critical thinking and incisive analysis that often require degrees of disenchantment, the production of an unremitting narrative of woe – unearthing a thousand years of othering, racism, exploitation, and domination in the textual record – can imbue in students a paralyzing, existential sense of dread and pessimism.

Finding moments like the episode between the two women, episodes which awaken curiosity and instigate discussion, then helps to interrupt, and ameliorate, any inadvertent production of an overarching, totalizing narrative that discourages, rather than encourages, idealism and action in the young.Footnote ⁴²

It is also important to point to the role played by children in the Sagas. Exhibits at the L’Anse aux Meadows heritage project, overseen by Parks Canada today, rightly call attention to the unique role of Snorri Thorfinnsson, Gudrid’s infant and the first European child to be born in the Americas, so far as we know. But ESR also highlights two Native American boys who are abducted from their parents by the expeditioners, baptized, and taught language (i.e., Old Norse), and who then become native informants relaying ethnographic information that the saga duly narrates (102–103).

These kidnapped boys, students should be told, form an important historical-anthropological hinge, and not only in the way the saga relates. Scientists today have discovered that Native Americans and Icelanders share DNA in the form of the C1e gene element: a genetic inheritance shared by no other ethnoracial groups in the world (Race 270–271). While scientists rightly do not expatiate on the meaning of this shared genetic heritage – beyond suggesting that unrecorded intermarriage might have occurred in premodernity – students can see, with this genetic evidence, the historicity of the Sagas in an immediate and forceful way.

Most importantly, we can call attention to the myriad ways the Sagas can be used to counter white supremacists who see the Vinland expeditions as an example of early European supremacy. For white supremacists, “Hail Vinland!” is a rallying cry today that has displaced “Heil Hitler,” as supremacists imagine themselves as latter-day “Vikings” continuing an “ancient battle” in the Americas.Footnote ⁴³ Students are tickled to learn that, contrary to white-supremacist wishful thinking, the Vinland Sagas depict Native American success, and European failure, as the would-be settler-colonists are routed from Vinland, and that thereafter, Native American genes spread to Iceland, complicating ideas of who has conquered whom.

Thanks to early encounters in North America, on which the Vinland Sagas open a window, white supremacists who are so proud of their white heritage are not even really as white as they think they are. This is something students discover when they take a course in early global literature.Footnote ⁴⁴

Teaching Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali

To the question, “Where were the Black people in the Middle Ages?” the epic of Sunjata returns the panorama of a thriving, dynamic trans-Saharan Africa: a vast Black Africa alive in indigenous story traditions, visitor accounts by sojourners such as the world-traversing Moroccan Ibn Battuta, poetry, song, dance, performance arts, music, monuments, gold, sculptures, law codes, games, rituals, festivities, and treasure, among a plethora of expressive and material culture.

Students reading Sunjata,Footnote ⁴⁵ the best-known of premodern African epics, learn that before there was a Wakanda in modern pop culture, there was the massive premodern Empire of Mali, stretching at its height from the Atlantic Ocean to the interiors of central Africa, encompassing nearly half a million square miles (Reference GomezGomez, African Dominion 220), preceded by the kingdoms of Ghana, and succeeded by the empire of Songhay (see Fig. 1).

Fig. 1: Map of the Empire of Mali

Beyond West Africa, civilizations in Ethiopia, Nubia, the Swahili Coast, Zimbabwe, Benin, among others, have been excavated, studied, and offered to the academy and the public through books and articles, heritage sites, digital projects, and film and television documentaries that should, at their best, have made it unlikely, if not impossible, for questions like those addressed to Reference WhitakerWhitaker to be asked – yet knowledge of premodern Africa seems to have been siloed in ways that prevented it from reaching my colleague’s otherwise “well-educated” interlocuters.

Sundiata can thus be offered to students as a gateway to the rich cultures and societies of premodern Africa across siloes of knowledge, with journeys of discovery made through student presentations and reports, term papers, and collaborative projects that students can be asked to undertake.Footnote ⁴⁶

Students are always impressed to read about the birth of an African empire, as recorded by its people over the centuries through their griots or jeliw: bard-archivists entrusted with the generational transmission of history, and whose ancestors played key roles as advisors and counselors to rulers of old. These bardic reciters-musicians-singers-historians-counselors descend from families who pass down their specialized, inherited knowledge and role across the generations as virtually a “caste” privilege.Footnote ⁴⁷

Unsurprisingly, Sundiata is often students’ favorite text in my global literature classes. It is a text that should be taught with substantial contextualization at the outset. Students should understand something of how oral traditions transmit knowledge – and why there may be formulaic repetitions, inconsistencies, or even contradictions in whatever version of Sundiata they read, narrated by contemporary jeliw with all their individual preferences, after oral transmission for hundreds of years, and set down in writing by transcribers, translators, and editors.

They should also understand that numerous variants of the epic exist – by a 1997 count, there are sixty-four published versions (in addition to oral performances by living jeliw) – and the translation they read is but one version of the multi-variant epic of Old Mali, and other variants may offer details of plot and treatment differing greatly from the version they read, even when a core content exists (Reference GomezGomez, African Dominion 390–392 n.2).Footnote ⁴⁸

These substantial caveats do not seem to deter instructors or students, however, and the epic is encountered in full or abridged form in many kinds of courses. Berkeley’s ORIAS websites, designed for K-12 educators, testifies to the epic’s enduring popularity: https://orias.berkeley.edu/resources-teachers/monomyth-heros-journey-project/sundiata

The texts listed in Section 4 are the most often used English translations of the epic in classroom teaching: the Longman’s/Pearson’s translation by D(jibril) T(amsir) Reference Kouyaté and PickettNiane and G. D. Pickett, transposed and edited from the narration of Mamoudou Kouyaté, who claims descent in the lineage of the Reference Kouyaté and PickettKouyatés serving Sunjata’s royal Keita line; the Hackett translation by Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradDavid C. Conrad, transcribed from an abridged oral narration by Djanka Tassey Condé of the Condés of Fadama; and the Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson translation (Epic), performed by the jeli Fa-Digi Sisòkò, and recorded, transcribed, and translated in stages by an African-western team of six collaborators coordinated by John William Johnson.

My preference is to teach the Reference Kouyaté and PickettKouyaté-Niane-Pickett translation, “the most influential single version of the story” as base text, in part because it has the fullest rendition of the epic’s key materials, while occasionally interleaving details from Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad and Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson to discuss alternate traditions and story details (Reference BelcherBelcher 92). Instructors who want to stress the performance aspects of contemporary oral narrations of the epic may prefer to center the Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson or Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad translations instead.

The Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad abridgement (which contains omissions of many passages that are summarized for readers by the translator) features a chatty jeli-narrator who intrudes modern musings ranging from his thoughts on race (“Americans are the best of the white people” [98]) to repeated mentions of muskets, guns, and gunpowder, that is, nonexistent technology in premodern Mali (e.g., 29, 55, 64, 69, 85, 92, 103, 109, 115, 119).Footnote ⁴⁹ A colleague who has taught the Norton anthology extract excerpted from Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad reports that students became confused by, and skeptical of the narrator – whose proclamations about cities (“if Paris was ever built by anyone, it was God”), musings on Black–White relations (“God made blackness after he made whiteness”), and views on women (“No matter how proud a girl is, once you call her ‘beautiful,’ she will soften”) – are admittedly odd, to put it gently (100, 4, 23).

But the Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad translation is highly interesting as a rendition of orality, featuring a jeli with a big personality and many opinions, responding to his audience in a lively, sprawling way – catering, for instance, to avid interest in family genealogies of not-necessarily-central characters who are ancestors (while omitting core events of the epic), and interpolating modern topics and his personal opinions to bring alive the dynamics of performance. Dramatizing how orature works, this translation would be excellent for courses on performance and the dramatic arts. It also offers engaging material for courses on medievalism.

Still, for those interested in oral performance as a dynamic process, even in a written text, the Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson translation is likely a better choice. This is a word-for-word transcription of a four-hour performance of the epic in verse (with rare prose interpolations by the translator) recited by a jeli whose cadences are beautifully caught in the transcription – a jeli, moreover, who has an assistant-apprentice commenting on his recitation throughout, in a call-and-response dynamic well-captured in the text.Footnote ⁵⁰ Much is opaque in the narration, however, and Johnson’s copious notes are absolutely essential to study carefully, for students to make sense of what they are reading.

Delightfully, the jeli-narrator in Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson uses ideophones to convey actions, like making a tearing sound, “fèsè fèsè fèsè!” as Sunjata’s dog rips Dankaran Tuman’s dog to shreds (Epic 64), or a falling sound, “gejebu!” when Sogolon drops to her knees (Epic 61), and a rushing sound, “birri birri birri” as Susu people pursue Fakoli, and “yrrrrrrr!” when they attack him (Epic 61). The liveliness of the orature communicates a sense of immediacy, a sense of you-are-there, that is unmatched. This jeli-narrator contradicts himself or loses the thread when he is tired; he takes breaks, then forgets where he left off. For students of ethnography, folklore, anthropology, drama, orature, and performance arts, the Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson translation is superior.

Graduate students might forge a path through the copious notes more easily, to understand what’s happening in the Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson narrative line-by-line, and a graduate class can usefully read Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson’s fuller companion volume, Reference SisòkòSon-Jara: The Mande Epic, Madekan/English Edition with Notes and Commentary as base text. Indeed, if an instructor can afford to spend several weeks on Sunjata, a comparison of Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson, Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad, and Reference Kouyaté and PickettKouyaté-Niane-Pickett would yield many fruitful discussions on the role of narrators and audiences, translations, and the retrieval of stories across time.

The Reference Kouyaté and PickettKouyaté-Niane-Pickett version (henceforth, Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata), is compact, yet highly detailed and vivacious, and a pragmatic choice that readily allows us to approach the diegesis as a set of key stories within a central epic framework – a narrative tree – from start to finish, by a griot who substantially refrains from foregrounding his personality, or indulging in digressions.Footnote ⁵¹ Students immediately recognize what narrative trees are like – acclimated as they are to contemporary popular culture, where narrative trees proliferate (e.g., the capacious Star Trek universe) – so that changes in details across alternate versions of stories tend to excite questions of why, which can prompt lively discussions.

Michael A. Gomez’ recent scholarship guides us to see the epic as narrating the formation of an African empire out of earlier regional polities in the thirteenth century, while establishing the geographic boundaries and constituent territories of that empire at its most powerful expanse and greatest height in the fourteenth (“Epic;” African Dominion, chapters 5–7). Simultaneously, Gomez points to how Islam, a global religion, starts to take root among the Mande/Mandinka, embedding itself in social structures and spreading its influence.Footnote ⁵²

We thus see early globalism in West Africa taking the form of global religious forces that arrive, and negotiate local and regional cultures and societies, transforming political structures and human relations, personal identities, and producing new articulations of power.

Signs of Islam are everywhere in the epic. We learn that Sunjata’s royal family, the Keitas, impressively claim descent from Bilal ibn Rabah, the Black African companion to the Prophet Mohammad, who occupies the esteemed role of the first muezzin or summoner of the faithful to prayer (2). Princes of Mali make the hajj (2). Sunjata wears the robes of “a great Muslim king,” and Islamic jinn populate the narrative alongside indigenous deities (73, 70–72).

Traditional beliefs, practices, and forces do not disappear, however, but transact an intertwining coexistence with Islamic beliefs, practices, and forces; and scholars invariably point to the religious syncretism the epic exhibits. Animal sacrifices are made to Islamic forces like jinn, but also to indigenous deities; individuals may possess pre-Islamic occult forms of personal power (nyama, dalilu) that are inherited or achieved, but can also possess Islamic gifts of grace and blessings (baraka); and merchants who spread Islam jostle alongside the powerful old hunter-guilds and smiths of pre-Islamic society (Reference GomezAfrican Dominion 91).

Revealingly, one outcome of globalism-as-religion is a transformation in leadership roles earlier occupied by women:

In the epic of Mali, however, Mande women are not rulers, but “become alternative sites of power” through “their resituation as sorcerers and reification as mothers” (Reference GomezAfrican Dominion 74):

Some of the totemic power of women is glimpsed in the story of the buffalo-woman of Do (Daw), Do Kamissa (“Kamissa of Daw”), who in her animal form as a wild buffalo ravages the countryside until she is killed by two Traore hunters whom she advises on how to kill her and ask for Sogolon Kedju, Sunjata’s future mother, as their reward.

Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata only has a terse account of Kamissa’s deeds, but other versions elaborate that she has been disenfranchised by her brother(s) from property rights because she is female, or that she has been mistreated by her nephew, the ruler of Do, who’s her foster-son: Her rampaging then becomes a kind of feminine retribution for injustice (Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad 28–29, Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson, Epic 31–33). Following the buffalo-woman’s instructions, the hunters bring Sogolon to Maghan Kon Fatta (Maghan the Handsome), Sunjata’s father-to-be, who has already received prophetic tidings that the hideously ugly woman he receives will birth a child who will be “the seventh conqueror of the earth,” and “more mighty than Alexander” (6).Footnote ⁵⁴

Sogolon’s hyperbolic ugliness is legion in all versions of the epic. In Sundiata, she has a hump, monstrous eyes, and bulbous breasts, her body covered in long hairs, like an animal (6–7, 11).

While jeliw no doubt enjoy teasing out Sogolon’s ugliness, students are often struck by how the monstrosity of the bride, juxtaposed against the handsomeness of the groom, reverses the familiar Beauty-and-the-Beast story-formula of the West. If the Beast, in this African epic, is the woman, and Beauty is the man, what does that say about the values of this African society?

They soon see that with the birth of Sunjata, mention of Sogolon’s hideousness fades, and her exemplarity as a mother becomes the focus instead. The story thus suggests that it is female fertility, not female beauty, that matters most. Sogolon gains in status and importance once maternity is achieved: Motherhood, and the birth of important sons, confers status and authority in premodern texts.

But in order for Sogolon to conceive Sunjata, a struggle must first take place between her very strong “wraith” and Maghan Keita’s, as Beauty repeatedly fails to impregnate the Beast on their wedding night and continues to fail for a week (11–12). Presented as combat, a male-female struggle is shown to occur between occult powers possessed by the woman, and occult powers possessed by the man – which might be a way to affirm the groom’s aversion to the bride’s looks, perhaps, or the near-universal preference of virgins in epic stories not to be deflowered – to explain why the king cannot perform:

This allegorical struggle between the sexes ends when the king frightens his bride with a lie, she faints, and he impregnates her. Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata draws a veil over the impregnation, yet students are never in doubt that the reason Sogolon wakes up “already a wife,” and having conceived Sunjata, is that a rape occurred while she was unconscious (12). If you ask students why, in their opinion, there’s a rape, and obstacles to the birth of this hero – and the less-than-moral circumstances surrounding the birth of other heroes in other epics and romances – a lively classroom discussion will ensue that can later be picked up in other texts, including The Secret History of the Mongols.Footnote ⁵⁶

Sogolon’s disabling ugliness, and Sunjata’s childhood years of crawling around on all fours before (instigated by his mother) he finally hauls himself up and decides to walk through a massive act of will, then afford an opportunity to discuss the role of disability in the epic.Footnote ⁵⁷ To explain why Sunjata doesn’t walk till he is seven years old (or seventeen, or older, in variants), the story has it that he is either a lazy, lax, and greedy child, or that Naré Maghan’s first wife Sassuma Berete hamstrings the child with a hex, or something else (15, 18; Reference Condé, griot-jeli and ConradCondé-Conrad 49).

“Many sources present this as a disability (as opposed to volition),” Gomez says, “maintaining that he was either born in this condition or becomes a ‘cripple’ later in childhood. Whether congenital or subsequent, it becomes a site of miraculous transformation and verification of divine destiny” (Reference GomezAfrican Dominion 75).

That disability can be the sign of a divine destiny, and destiny can be immanent in an ugly woman, are important ideas the epic attests. Indeed, Johnson points out that in premodern Mali “Deformed people, or those with epilepsy, are considered by many to be possessed of special occult power (nyama). Presumably such a person would be of benefit [to society] because of his/her power” (Reference Sisòkò, griot-jeli and William JohnsonSisòkò-Johnson, Epic 113). Story traditions foregrounding alternative ideas about deformity, beauty, and disability may be one reason the epic of Mali is a favorite text of students.

Ultimately, however, Gomez suggests,

The epic of Old Mali is not alone or unique, of course, in its portrayal of “good” women as those who serve the interests of male protagonists, while “evil” women are those who supposedly cause communal vulnerability and destruction because of their ambitions. The Vinland Sagas have Gudrid/Freydis, and the epic of Mali has Sogolon/Sassuma, rival co-wives of Maghan Keita.

But Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata is arguably unusual for the extent to which the epic acknowledges that the hero’s success depends on women. In his decisive epic battles, Sunjata finds that his principal foe, the sorcerer-king Sumaoro Kanté of the Susu people, wields a powerful occult magic that even Sunjata, with all his nyama, dalilu, and baraka, his sacrifices to jinn and deities, military prowess, and strategic confederation of West Africa’s forces, cannot overcome.Footnote ⁵⁸

Iron weapons bounce off Sumaoro, who can also vanish at will, making him impossible to defeat in the battlefield through the usual means of war (52). “Didn’t people say that Sumaoro could assume sixty-nine different shapes to escape his enemies?” the narrator asks, “to beat the king of Sosso other weapons were necessary” (52).Footnote ⁵⁹

Sumaoro’s sole weakness, it turns out, is that he is magically vulnerable to a white rooster’s spur – a secret that Nana Triban, Sunjata’s half-sister who’s the daughter of Sassuma (or, in some versions, Kolonkan, Sunjata’s full-sister by Sogolon), ferrets out of Sumaoro, when she becomes one of the sorcerer-king’s wives or concubines, and flatters him into an unwary bedchamber disclosure (Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata 57–58, 64).Footnote ⁶⁰

Armed with this powerful knowledge, Sunjata merely has to graze Sumaoro with a white rooster’s spur, and “Sumaoro felt his powers leave him” (65). Sorcery and a woman’s cunning win the battle, and the defeat of this formidable foe is what allows Sunjata to reclaim his homeland, recover the territories ravaged by Sumaoro, and unite regional polities into the new Empire of Mali.Footnote ⁶¹

The revelation of a woman’s crucial agency in securing the genesis of the Malian empire is, like all that Reference GomezGomez notices, a double-edged moment, “key in what is otherwise a masculinist enterprise, her intervention a critique of that masculinity” (Reference GomezAfrican Dominion 83).Footnote ⁶² That a woman secures victory on the battlefield with a bedroom secret is a way to say that men ultimately depend on women, but it is also a cautionary tale to say men should also fear women for their wiles and bedroom treachery, a caution as old as the tale of the Nazirite Samson.

Attributions of female agency and responsibility occur in major and minor key in the epic’s variants. In Reference SisòkòSisòkò-Johnson, Sunjata’s family has a famed female griot or jelimuso, Tumu Maniya, who announces Sunjata’s birth to his father before Sassuma’s messenger is able to announce Sassuma’s son’s birth, thereby formally establishing Sunjata as the ruler’s first-born son (Epic 49–51). This jelimuso (and not Sunjata’s jeli, Balla Faséké, in Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata) sings the praise-song, the “Song of the Bow,” when Sunjata finally stands up and starts to walk – and Sunjata walks not because of bending an iron rod made by male smiths into a bow, as in Sundiata, but because of a staff his mother cut for him from a custard apple tree (Epic 57–60, 62).Footnote ⁶³ Tumu Maniya is the creator of the iron rasp, a hunter’s musical instrument; accompanies Sunjata’s family into exile; and is prominent in announcing events.

The hero’s return to Mali from exile is also accomplished through a woman, Sunjata’s sister Kolonkan. In Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata, after exilic wandering that maps the boundaries of the Malian empire-to-be, and future political relations between Sunjata and his tributary companion-chiefs, Sogolon’s small refugee family arrives in Mema, where Sunjata grows to adulthood and rises in palace leadership over time. In due course, a group from Manden/Mali arrives, looking for Sunjata’s help against Sumaoro, and posing as merchants in the marketplace selling condiments harvested from Malian native plants.

A touching scene of reconciliation occurs when Kolonkan, shopping in the market, recognizes baobab and gnougou, plants which used to grow in her mother’s garden, and delightedly brings the visitors back to her mother. Joy poignantly ensues as “Sogolon took the baobab leaves and gnougou in her hand and put her nose to them as though to inhale all the scent,” “turning the precious condiments over and over in her hands” (44). This moving moment, in which sister and mother play prominent roles, marks the beginning of Sunjata’s return from exile and subsequent confronting of Sumaoro (43–45).Footnote ⁶⁴

This episode also foregrounds the importance of merchants in premodern societies. Sogolon and her small family of refugees joined merchant caravans in their exilic wandering to ensure safe travel, and “the merchants were good to Sogolon and her children” (32). The refugees are also recognized as Manden’s royal family by an embassy posing as merchants. Merchants, of course, are the arterial conduits of the premodern world, bringing news to far-flung societies separated by great distances, offering protection to traveling pilgrims or diplomats or refugees, and they stitch together the thriving commercial networks of the premodern world. In accounts where merchants are not themselves the protagonists, it’s helpful for students to notice the presence of merchants as facilitators in narrative webs.

Merchants’ goods, like baobab and gnougou, also point students to the many interlacing layers of material culture in Manden society. It’s significant that crops are the means by which social recognition and conciliation occur, testifying to the importance of plant domesticates. In each text, students can be asked to notice what plants and animals are important to a society, what items of material culture matter, and what constitutes abundance, or affords prestige, in that society.

Plants and animals are highlighted everywhere in Reference Kouyaté and PickettSundiata. The nine great witches of Mali whom Sassuma sets on Sunjata are moved by Sunjata’s generosity when he urges them to take what they want from his mother’s garden – loading them with aubergines, onions, and gnougou – when he catches them stealing her vegetables. He also betters the reward Sassuma promises them (cows, calves, rice, and hay) by giving them bushmeat: nine of the twelve elephants he has killed, one for each of them (24–26).

We see rulers like Maghan Keita distributing gifts of grain, clothes, gold, and fine loincloths, as well as large quantities of rice during celebrations (10–11, 14). This is a society where women wear gold in their hair, their wrists heavy with silver bracelets (9). Medicinal leaves are used to heal wounds and cure diseases (3), and the importance of sacrificial animals such as red bulls, white bulls, white rams, and white roosters is everywhere stressed (6, 50, 56, 71, 79). This is also a society where musical instruments like the balafon (see Fig. 2), strings, and tam-tams are important, alongside song and dance, and where iron tools and weapons – such as Sunjata’s bow, that only he could bend, like Odysseus’ – do not fail to be mentioned (10, 13, 21, 37).

Fig. 2: The balafon, a griot’s musical instrument

Material and expressive culture show Manden to be a courtly and warrior society. Feasting, ritual celebrations, spectacles, and festivities abound. A hundred smiths in the royal forges of Manden manufacture bows, spears, arrows, and shields for warriors. Rich carpets, fine scimitars, and splendid weapons ornament the halls of kings in West Africa, who like to play games of wit and skill (20, 30, 34). Horses are prized, underscoring the importance of cavalry as well as infantry in war: The victorious Sunjata is greeted by the women of Mali who lay down their colorful wrappers, so that his horse need not dirty its hooves (80).

Hospitality to travelers and strangers is another important theme in premodern global texts, foregrounded by the degrees of hospitality Sogolon and her family receive in their epic journey into exile. Without being able to depend on the hospitality of others, including strangers, premodern travel would largely have been impossible.

Most importantly, the epic of Mali attests the dictum that, for the inhabitants of the world, every place is the center of the world. It tells us: If you want salt, go to Niani, the capital of Mali; if you want gold, go to Niani; if you want fine cloth, go to Niani; if you want fish, go to Niani; if you want meat, go to Niani; if you want to see an army, go to Niani; if you want to see a great king, go to Niani (82).

Sunjata, the “hero of many names,” peerless among men, is lord of Niani, the center of the world. And because of he who gave the world peace, “Niani became the navel of the earth” (82).

Teaching Ibn Fadlan’s Mission to the Volga/Journey to Russia

If the Vinland Sagas show resource extraction as a compelling motive for crossing an ocean, and Sundiata shows an African royal family traveling great distances because they are political refugees, the mission of Ahmad ibn Fadlan ibn al-Abbas ibn Rashid ibn Hammad –  a representative from the tenth-century Abbasid empire –  points to another reason for long-distance journeying: diplomacy.

Ibn Fadlan is an envoy or messenger (rasul) from the Caliph al-Muqtadir to Yiltawar, King of the Volga Bulghars (Saqalibah). The Bulghar king, a convert to Islam, has asked the Caliph for instruction in the faith, resources to build a mosque with a minbar from which the Caliph’s name may be pronounced in Friday prayers, and a fort “to protect [Yiltawar] against the kings who opposed him” (3).Footnote ⁶⁵

Granting Yiltawar’s requests allows al-Muqtadir to accomplish key goals in early globalism. Baghdad, center of the Abbasid Caliphate (but with rival caliphates in Iberia and North Africa), gets to acknowledge a Muslim kingdom at the peripheries of Islam’s reach, and graciously send jurists and instructors as an act of doctrinal largesse that underscores Baghdad’s religio-political centrality. Bonds are strengthened between center and periphery, and the empire’s power and prestige are officially acknowledged in far-flung terrains.

At the same, the building of a fort in Bulghar territory not only secures the Bulghar king a military buttress against his neighboring rivals (chief of whom are the Khazars, whose king and elites have converted to a rival religion, Judaism), but helps to protect the lucrative trade in furs and slaves from the region for the Abbasids, a trade highly beneficial to Baghdad (xxxi–xxxii). Religion, commerce, and military-political goals thus dovetail in one diplomatic maneuver: an early version of the mission civilisatrice, so to speak, in fortuitous answer to the invitation of a regional power.

Ibn Fadlan – who is not the ambassador, but the man delegated to read the Caliph’s letter to Yiltawar, supervise the requested jurists and instructors, and deliver the gifts from al-Muqtadir to the Bulghar king – ends up gifting later ages with a lively eyewitness account (henceforth, Mission) of his group’s voyage from Baghdad, across Central Asia, and northward up the Volga, offering a vista of riches mined by scholars for information about the tenth-century worlds of Eurasia and its peoples, especially the Oghuz (or Ghuzziyyah, a seminomadic Turkic people who in the following century would issue forth into the Near East and become known as the Seljuks), the Bulghars (a Finno-Ugrian people later associated with the Volga Tatars), the Rus (“Russian Vikings”/”Northmen”), and the Khazars.

For students, Ibn Fadlan’s account positions a second window into the international fur trade first glimpsed in the barter with Indigenous peoples, and Karlsefni’s liquidation of his loot in Norway, in the Vinland Sagas. Here, we see merchants in Eurasia trading in sable and black fox, and the Bulghar king paying tribute to the Khazar king in sables – one for every tent in his kingdom (28, 31). We see that, like precious fabrics, furs are both export goods and international currency. Here, too, students are granted a second view of Nordic peoples, this time as the Rus (Rusiyyah), and described not by the Nordics themselves, but by someone from an Arab civilization rendered as infinitely more advanced and sophisticated.Footnote ⁶⁶

Students also encounter eyewitness testimony in global literature and can reflect on the apparent authority of first-person “reports” – which they will encounter again and again, including Marco Polo’s – and how the narrator-witness’s persona colors the narrative.Footnote ⁶⁷ This particular narrator, students quickly see, complicates received notions of Orientalism encountered in modern literature classes where Edward Said, or Saidian-style criticism, is on the syllabus.

After all, Ibn Fadlan is a rapporteur from the East, so-called, who gazes upon the peoples of Central Asia and Eurasia in ways that Saidian discourse argues the West, so-called, gazes on the non-West, especially the East, constructing whole regions and peoples in projects of knowledge/power.Footnote ⁶⁸ The examples here are numerous. Of the Khwarazmians, Ibn Fadlan says, “When they talk they sound just like starlings” (7). The speech of foreigners never sounds quite human, does it?

Another people, the Oghuz, “transhumant nomads” who live “wretched lives,” “do not base their beliefs on reason,” but decide matters “by consultation,” and respect “the lowliest and most worthless individual in their community” – a process so demotic it seems ludicrous to the narrator (10). Oghuz are also unhygienic: They “do not clean themselves when they defecate or urinate,” and “do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity” (10). Women are neither veiled nor secluded: “their womenfolk do not cover themselves in the presence of a man,” and one man’s wife even “uncovered her vulva and scratched it, right in front of us” (10).

Such racializing superciliousness, Reference Montgomery and ibn FadlanJames E. Montgomery opines, is because “the imperial experience is at the heart of Ibn Fadlan’s account” (xxv). Baghdad, where the Arboreal Mansion of al-Muqtadir had a silver-and-gold tree with swaying branches and singing birds, automata shaped as knights on horseback performing cavalry maneuvers, a famed menagerie with a lion house and elephant enclosure, and a caliphal complex boasting opulent architecture (xxvii) – the reasoning goes – makes the world Ibn Fadlan encounters elsewhere seem primitive to him.

But Mission also offers prime examples of how a representative from a sedentary civilization views peoples from nomad or seminomadic civilizations. If your syllabus includes John of Plano Carpini’s Historia Mongalorum, and/or William of Rubruck’s Itinerarium, here is an opportunity to ask students to consider similarities and contrasts in how a Muslim envoy from the Abbasid Empire, and a Franciscan envoy or missionary from the Latin West, views the nomadic/semi-nomadic peoples of Eurasia.

Students can be shown how a water taboo in continental Eurasia, issuing from exigent environmental circumstances, is moralized as filth and a lack of hygiene by an unsympathetic urbanite, and how the doctrinally prim can moralize variant bodily behaviors in other cultures as impious, or abhorrently immodest. This is also an opportunity to discuss the adaptive resourcefulness and range of human responses that have made for survival in difficult environmental conditions.

A graduate student, Patrick Naeve, once made the excellent point in class that the region of Eurasia Ibn Fadlan encounters must seem to him like a spatialized, geographic version of jahiliyyah – the time of ignorance, before the advent of Islam. Like a tenth-century panorama of the Wild, Wild West, this “place-time of ignorance” (Naeve) is both fascinating and shocking, a locale where anything can happen: where blood feuds, rough violence, and alien ways predominate, and myriad polities are jostling for power, far from the Abbasid center.

We might add that when Ibn Fadlan tutors the Bulghars on correct doctrinal practice in Islam (al-Muqtadir’s instructors never make it, so Ibn Fadlan acts in their place), he speaks from the Shafii jurisprudential school of Islam dominant in Baghdad, opposing the Hanafi-based Islam of the Bulghars, and, through his admonishments, and stern attempts at correction, practices an evolutionary discourse of religious superiority.

A diplomat from the Near East, here, denies the world of Eurasia coevalness in myriad ways that students familiar with Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other will recognize, when other cultures are perceived as primitive and non-coeval with your own: located in backward eras of time that your own culture has long left behind, in its accomplishment of civilizational maturity. What is largely implicit in the Vinland Sagas’ descriptions of Indigenous fascination with European metal weaponry is made explicit here: Ibn Fadlan’s racializing discourse, like the Sagas’, pivots on the denial of coevalness to other societies.

Moreover, an example of a lookingglass, reverse Orientalism – Occidentalism? – occurs when Ibn Fadlan describes the Northmen known as the Rus, detailing the barbarous filth of these Nordics with eloquent disgust: “They are the filthiest of all God’s creatures,” “defecating or urinating and do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity” (33). “They have intercourse in full view of their companions. Sometimes they gather in a group and do this in front of each other” (33). The narrator saves the worst for last, in a portrayal vividly brought to life in the film The Thirteenth Warrior, a cinematic rendition of Michael Crichton’s historical fantasy, Eaters of the Dead:

The Rus – ethnic cousins to the Vinland Sagas’ Greenlanders and Icelanders – are thus subjected to tenth-century Orientalism by a representative from what Said would consider the East.

What happens, then, to a concept like Orientalism, when “westerners” or “northerners” are described in Orientalist terms by an “easterner”? Or when Orientalism operates for the religiously devout as a category of pre-Islamic time, as jahiliyyah? Can there be Orientalism without an Orient, like racism before race, or nationalism before the existence of nations? Is Occidentalism reversed Orientalism?

Such questions repeatedly arise, when students read early global literatures alongside the modern literatures that are the standard fare of literature departments, reshaping their understanding of modern critical theory.

Delightfully, Ibn Fadlan’s account also depicts the denigrated natives answering back to the representative of empire. When the narrator exclaims at the immodesty of Oghuz women, the husband of the woman who is comfortably scratching herself rejoins: “we might uncover it in your presence and you might see it, but she keeps it safe so that no one can get to it. This is better than her covering it up and letting others have access to it.” Gamely, Ibn Fadlan admits: “Illicit intercourse is unheard of” among the Oghuz (11).

Similarly, as he witnesses a deceased Rus chieftain being cremated, he reports an unflattering view of Muslim funerary customs when one of the Rusiyyah dubs Arabs “a lot of fools” because “you … take your nearest and dearest and those whom you hold in the highest esteem and put them in the ground, where they are eaten by vermin and worms. We … cremate them there and then, so that they enter [heaven] on the spot” (38). Ibn Fadlan does not quite say the man has a point, but unexpectedly, a moment of religious comparatism materializes.

Indeed, it is the narrator’s willingness to report what the other thinks and says – not merely limiting us to his own views alone – which hatches open moments where bridges across vast cultural divides can appear. One of these instants occurs right after Ibn Fadlan describes the unhygienic Oghuz: “One of them heard me reciting the Qur’an and found it beautiful. He approached the interpreter and said, ‘Tell him not to stop’” (11).

Suddenly, our sense of these supposedly self-polluting, uncivilized Turks shifts in a breath: They are moved by aural beauty, which they value in the recitation of a sacred text alien to them, a deeply humanizing moment.

Likewise, the otherness of climate and atmospheric conditions in the north – a cold so extreme that the narrator reports they were all ready to die (9) – does not prevent Ibn Fadlan from marveling at other alien atmospheric conditions, such as the aurora borealis. A moment of cultural rapprochement crystallizes when he and Yiltawar agree on how to interpret the swirling red northern lights, and decide that the “men, animals, and weapons” they see in the sky are warring “groups of jinn, believers and unbelievers, who do battle” nightly (23).

Their shared wonder at the magnificent spectacle is tempered by our recognition that both come from military societies, so they reflexively see war and violence in the skies, rather than something more peaceably benign. But moments of connection between cultures, and appreciation rather than fear of the utterly alien, are not so common in literatures of encounter that we should fail to take opportunities to recognize and discuss them with students whenever we can.

For these and other reasons, Mission is a rewarding text to teach. Students who are following the trail of how women are portrayed in early global literatures will notice that in the Nordic funerary rites, it is an old woman, dubbed the “Angel of Death,” who summons, prepares, stabs, and ensures the rape, torture, and death of the young female slave who is sacrificed to join her deceased master in the afterlife (35–37, Frye 68–70). They will remember that today, too, old women are usually the members of society who perform rites such as genital cutting on girls and young women, and can be asked to ponder how women are socialized, in the past and today, to accept and reproduce their roles.

Mission to the Volga also offers thick-descriptive details of what caravan routes and overland journeys are like: descriptions useful to compare across texts, and with depictions of sea journeys. Ibn Fadlan’s embassy from Baghdad, like Sunjata’s royal family, travels with merchants for safety – here, in a large caravan of 300 mounts and 5,000 men, covering on average ten miles a day (13). We see that in Eurasia fabric is the currency of choice, and gifts are expected by those they meet (which John of Plano Carpini, unable to grasp local economics, will moralize as greed, three centuries later). We also see that slaves are ubiquitous in the world, with soldier-slaves accompanying the Baghdad embassy, and women slaves ostensibly choosing death alongside their deceased Nordic masters.

Students will encounter variations of all this, again and again, across the texts of the semester.

Teaching “The Slave of MS. H.6,” selected documents from India Traders of the Middle Ages, and Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale

Reference GhoshIn an Antique Land (henceforth, Reference GhoshAL) is a much-read, highly-popular ethnographic-cum-historical narrative by the master-novelist Amitav Ghosh, while “Slave” is Ghosh’s less-read, masterly exercise of historical scholarship. Both detail the writer’s discovery of the existence of an enslaved man from India’s Malabar coast, mentioned in letters written to Abraham ben Yiju by his friend and business associate Khalaf ibn Isaac, and lodged in the Genizah archive of documents.Footnote ⁷⁰

Identified in Judeo-Arabic by three consonants, B-M-H, this enslaved individual so haunts Ghosh that he teaches himself twelfth-century Judeo-Arabic paleography, and commits to intensive research to retrieve from the anonymity of history a possible name and identity, and the lineaments of a possible life lived by a single subaltern subject.

Reference GhoshAntique Land’s companion text, Reference Ghosh“Slave,” is a rich exercise in historical scholarship: thorough, self-conscious, and thoughtful in acknowledging what it is able and unable to know. Ghosh learns that premodern slavery differs significantly from the Atlantic slavery of the plantation eras, and Abraham’s man, far from being abject, is the trader’s trusted “business agent, a respected member of his household” who accompanies maritime cargoes between Egypt and the Malabar coast (Reference Ghosh“Slave” 162):

While the above is a condensed simplification, students may remember that Tyrkir, the enslaved “southerner” in Greenlanders’ Saga who was part of Leif Eiriksson’s household since Leif was a child, and who discovers wild grapes in Vinland and delivers his news in excited German, is welcomed with relief when he returns, with Leif affectionately calling him “foster-father” (Reference Magnusson and PálssonMagnusson and Palsson 55, 57). Ties of fictive kinship, indeed.

Students are afforded several views, in our global texts, of the multifariousness of medieval enslavement: They glimpse a German domestic in a Nordic household who is treated like a member of the family (Reference Magnusson and PálssonMagnusson and Palsson 57); see slave-soldiers accompany an Abbasid embassy to the Volga; and find an Indian business agent of a Jewish merchant in the Indian Ocean trade accompanying valuable cargos.

In Reference ThackstonKamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi’s Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar (henceforth Reference ThackstonVijayanagar) the vizier of the Indian empire of Vijayanagar, who leads the army to war against the kingdom of Gulbarga, is a eunuch, like Zheng He, the Yunnanese Muslim admiral who helms the convoy of Ming China’s “treasure ships” that reach African shores (Reference ThackstonVijayanagar 315). In Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s Reference Mackintosh-SmithAccounts of China and India, the eunuch court officials of Tang China are also seen to have immense status and authority. Early global literature opens a multifaceted window into the lives of the (once-)unfree.

Through skillful sleuthing and some dexterous reasoning, Ghosh arrives at a plausible name for the anonymous Indian – Bomma – even hazarding some colorful details about “Ben Yiju’s toddy-loving slave, Bomma, the Bhuta-worshiping fisherman from Tulunad” (“Slave” 214). When Ghosh comes to some of his necessarily speculative conclusions, because the archive can disclose only so much, he is as responsible as his love of his subject and fidelity to scholarship enable him to be.

“Slave” is thus an example – like Reference Bartlet and SkinnerSuzanne Bartlet’s and Patricia Skinner’s Licoricia of Winchester, which attempts to piece together the details of a Jewish woman’s life from the often-hostile records of medieval England – of how to respond to the silences of the archive: how to responsibly, ethically, attempt what Saidiya Hartman calls forms of “critical fabulation” when you are confronted with a void, and trying to “imagine what might have happened or might have been said or might have been done,” in moments when you need extrapolative scholarship, so as to reach some half-way satisfactory answers (Reference HartmanHartman 12).

A critical imagination no doubt comes more readily to Ghosh than most, a scholar who is primarily a novelist. Indeed, Ghosh’s skills as a storyteller are everywhere on display: Reference GhoshAntique Land feels like a novel, students say, even when its title emphatically announces that it is not. The book’s structure – episodes of ethnographic narrative from Ghosh’s anthropological fieldwork at two Egyptian villages, Lataifa and Nashawy, intercut by re-creation of events from the twelfth-century world of Abraham and Bomma – saturates the distant past with vivacious immediacy, even as it historicizes the present.

To do this, Ghosh carefully fashions hinges to interface past and present. A prospective marriage between a formerly-impoverished fellah, Eid, who made enough money working construction in Saudi Arabia to afford a marriage-payment for an “educated wife” from a “well-off” family is promptly followed by an episode about another trans-class marriage – the union of the well-to-do Abraham to an Indian slave-woman, Ashu, whom Abraham manumits (as witnessed in a deed of 17 February 1132) because, Ghosh reasons, he likely married her (Reference GhoshAL 226, 215, 227).

The departure of two young friends, Nabeel and Ismail, for extended work in Iraq, becomes an occasion to ask why Abraham’s own departure makes him stay away from Egypt for nearly two decades, when other India merchants journeyed back and forth: Ghosh reasons that it is blood-feud which causes Abraham’s long sojourn in Malabar, and that historical blood-feud then links to a modern blood-feud, when a dead Egyptian’s kinsmen do not receive blood-money compensation (Reference GhoshAL 161–162, 136).

Antique Land’s hinges eloquently function to suggest that the present and past are intricately interwoven, with Egypt and India, too, being interlinked.Footnote ⁷² Time and distance collapse; resemblances between past and present, countries and coasts, magically appear.

A twentieth-century Egyptian village is lodged in medieval time: To peasants, life is still a cycle of work in the fields, punctuated by the occasional mowlid or religious festival, ruled by the seasons, faith, and folkways. Modernity exists in urban metropoles, and love – whether marriage to one you love, or frequenting sex workers – is for city folk; fellaheen marry someone their family chooses, and birth extra field hands for labor, like always (Reference GhoshAL 215–220). Ghosh’s Egyptian informants even talk like premodern peasants: One asks if it’s possible to reach India, riding on a donkey (Reference GhoshAL 172–173).

Egypt and India, too, are not so different. Ghosh assures his informants that villagers in India live in mud houses and also use oxen for farming. The mischievous humor he occasionally unleashes at the expense of the villagers fails, of course, to strictly follow the participant-observer’s playbook for undertaking fieldwork when embedding in a community, but arises when Ghosh is frustrated at being repeatedly made by his informants into the other, who must represent all of India.

Race-as-religion rears its head incessantly: Ghosh’s village informants, who are Sunni Muslims (but believe in saints and ghosts), repeatedly tell him that as an Indian, and (nominally) Hindu, he must stop sati and bride-burning, and indeed, all cremations in India, as well as “cow-worship” in his infidel country; he must get circumcised, and marry a nice Muslim girl – be more like them, in other words. Assumed as an expert on India-manufactured water-pumps, because he’s Indian, the anthropologist has an up-front-and-personal view – sometimes hilariously, sometimes annoyingly – of how racial-religious essentialism works in intercultural encounters.

The way that religion, like race, functions to deliver absolute and fundamental differences among humans, in the past and today, is forcibly brought home in a terrifying memory from Ghosh’s childhood in Dhaka after Partition, when religious-communal riots between Muslims and Hindus are rife in India and Pakistan, and Ghosh’s family’s residential compound must serve as a sanctuary for terrified Hindus pursued by a Muslim mobFootnote ⁷³ (Reference GhoshAL 204–210).

In these modern-day encounters, the opacity of the other, and the failure to understand the other, are repeated themes. But an incandescent moment cuts a path through it all, when one villager succeeds in seeing from the viewpoint of the other. Nabeel, one of the two who later leave for work in Iraq, is looking around Ghosh’s kitchen while Ghosh is making tea, and suddenly exclaims to the anthropologist: “It must make you think of all the people you left at home … when you put that kettle on the stove with just enough water for yourself” (Reference GhoshAL 151–152).

This extraordinary instant, when the gaze of the anthropologist upon his subjects is suddenly turned back by a subject onto the anthropologist himself, witnesses an empathy that startlingly, momentarily, sends a bridge across chasmic differences. Ghosh’s characterization of the sensitive, intelligent Nabeel is inspired: An unlettered fellah from an impoverished, nondescript hamlet suddenly becomes unforgettable.

Given that characterization of Nabeel, when he and Ismail depart for oil-rich Iraq as migrant workers – becoming foreign labor under contemporary globalization, so as to earn money for their families back home in their hamlet – we can ask students if the characterization helps us to grasp, in the two friends’ deeply humanized faces and personalities, what it’s like for migrant workers in the US and elsewhere today.

Can we think and empathize – that is, follow Nabeel’s lead – to see, and understand something of the poverty that migrant workers come from, and the people they must leave behind, when they labor in a foreign land? I ask: Does this help us to think more sympathetically about undocumented workers today?

In the end, Ghosh’s juxtaposition of contemporary globalization – with its narrative of “development” that has youths from “underdeveloped” countries working overseas in richer or more “developed” countries – over and against the twelfth-century globalism of the Indian Ocean trade, finds more tolerance and acceptance in the past than today, across race, class, and religion.

After all, Bomma, the Indian slave from the Malabar coast, who is neither Muslim nor Jewish nor Arab, is trusted, depended on, manumitted, and eventually earns the title of Shaikh for himself (Reference GhoshAL 266). Ashu, Abraham’s wife from the Nair clan of Kerala, who was also a slave, and, Ghosh deduces, possibly even a sex worker in her earlier life, is also manumitted, and bears the Jewish merchant two children (Reference GhoshAL 226–230) who eventually return to Egypt with their father (Reference GhoshAL 302).

Compared with the globalism of the twelfth century, which seems to offer social mobility even to the most subaltern of subjects, contemporary globalization, Antique Land seems to say, highlights the inequality of nations, and the plight of migrant workers laboring in wealthy lands. While the communities of the Indian Ocean are known to have traded peaceably for centuries before the arrival of the Portuguese, and European imperialism, present-day globalization is shown to be fraught with uneven development that squeezes work opportunities and socioeconomic mobility at home, and witnesses exploitative labor practices, danger, and violence abroad.

In the end, as Ghosh triumphantly retrieves Bomma from anonymity, bearing a name, an ethnicity, a social background, an occupation, and even a personality of sorts, the sensitive Nabeel vanishes in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, when he delays his departure for too long, either because “he always needed to think a long time about everything,” or because he was hoping to earn just a little more for his family (Reference GhoshAL 353). Ghosh tries to imagine how Nabeel might have died, replaying in his mind scenes of frenzied riots in Iraq, in which unarmed, hapless Egyptian workers are attacked by resentful, angry Iraqis (Reference GhoshAL 350–353).

Just as Ghosh manages to pull one subaltern subject from the anonymity of history, therefore, he loses a friend who understood what it meant to be alone in a foreign land: Nabeel, who would, in time, become nameless and forgotten, yet another subaltern subject in the detritus of the past, lost to history.

As touchstones for two kinds of globalism, one in the past, and the other in the present, Bomma and Nabeel present much for students to think about.

Teaching Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi’s Mission to Calicut and Vijayanagar

Half a millennium after the ruler of the Abbasid Empire, the Caliph al-Muqtadir, sent an embassy responding to a request by a Muslim king in a distant land, another Muslim ruler – the Khagan Shahrukh Mirza, youngest son of Timur Lenkh (“Tamerlane,” to the West), and ruler of the Turko-Mongol Timurid Empire of Central Asia – also sent an embassy responding to a request by a Muslim king in a distant land: this time to Calicut, on the Malabar coast of the Indian subcontinent.

Diplomacy with religious overtones, we see, is a robust imperative that drives the arterial pathways of early globalism over many centuries, whether across great landmasses or across turbulent seas. Shahrukh’s emissary, Kamaluddin Abdul-Razzaq Samarqandi, gifts us an account of his journey – from Herat in 1442 to the Kingdom of Calicut, and thereafter to the Empire of Vijayanagar – that is as lively as Ibn Fadlan’s, but even more colorful, because his narratorial personality is more opinionated and voluble, and his style more erudite and self-referential, breaking into verse whenever the author wants to explore a subject with emphasis and intensity.Footnote ⁷⁴

Moreover, students attuned to race quickly notice that Vijayanagar contains racial epithets early in the narrative. India is “that dark region,” and essentialist references to “the glibness of Iraqis” and “the mysteriousness of Indians” begin the inventory of how the narrator characterizes foreign ethnoraces (299, 300). The South Asians Abdul-Razzaq meets, when he arrives in Calicut, are reduced to “Naked blacks with loin cloths tied from their navels to their knees,” with their king “as naked as other Hindus” (305).

In this hot, humid land, the envoy makes no concession to reasonableness in dressing for the climate: Meeting with “a group of Muslims” but “a horde of infidels,” he approvingly notes that “the Muslims wear fine clothing in the Arab fashion” whereas “king and beggar” in Calicut (very sensibly, we might think) only wear dhotis, and are thus “naked” savages (305, emphasis added). The racialization of foreign others (“I saw a people the likes of whom I had never imagined”) makes Abdul-Razzaq burst into verse:

Difficult to acknowledge as human because of skin color and dress, the inhabitants of this “strange nation” are reduced to “every ill-proportioned black thing” (305). If we saw the practice of Orientalism without an Orient, in Ibn Fadlan, in Abdul-Razzaq we see Orientalism practiced in a double-Orient: Here, a man from a “nearer” east is gazing upon those in a “farther” east – Central Asia gazing upon South Asia – and denigrating South Asians. Do we call this Orientalism too? Abdul-Razzaq’s racialization of others doesn’t even end at “that abode of infidels,” with “their unacceptable worship” but extends to those nearer home as well: Hormuzis, he says, have “mischief” “ingrained in their nature” which makes them “seize opportunities for vileness” (315, 307).

Vijayanagar is thus an excellent text with which to continue discussions of critical concepts like Orientalism and explore why and when race-making occurs. In premodern global texts, the overlap between race and religion happens with some regularity, not only in texts of encounter authored by Muslims but also those authored by Christians and others. Because Abdul-Razzaq is in India, his racializing discourse often hinges on skin color – epidermal race.

If you teach the Arabian Nights, where some stories feature treacherous, dangerous black slaves, and black low-class villains who seduce women of incomprehensible sexual appetites, Vijayanagar’s juxtaposition of “those with faces like the moon” – a praise-formula common in the Nights – against “every ill-proportioned black thing” furnishes a nexus of references with a long shadow.

But it is necessary to point out that racialization in Vijayanagar has two axes: issuing descriptions that castigate, and descriptions that exoticize difference.

Once the Timurid envoy reaches the capital city of Vijayanagar (bearing the same name as the empire – see Fig. 3), that global city’s otherness and difference effloresces as sensuality, spectacle, and exorbitance: Exotic bazaars teem with aromatic flowers in profusion; jewelers display pearls, diamonds, rubies, and emeralds for sale; an elephantorium supplies a thousand domesticated, wondrous beasts for the Mahanavami festival; brothels feature finely-dressed, exquisitely-bejeweled courtesans of great beauty; and, as exotically, a police force (to ensure the safety of brothel-clients’ possessions) is paid wages from taxation on the earnings of the lovely sex workers (308–310, 313).

Fig. 3: Map of the Empire of Vijayanagar

Indeed, Abdul-Razzaq is so dazzled by the city of Vijayanagar that we no longer hear complaints that Indians are ill-proportioned black things; instead, the inhabitants of Vijayanagar, a city with seven concentric walls, “have no equal in the world” (307).Footnote ⁷⁵

The emperor – Deva Raya II – is admittedly “dark of complexion,” but has a “pleasant” face (307). Seated in architectonic splendor, he wears “a tunic of Zaytuni silk and a necklace of lustrous pearls, the worth of which the jeweler of the mind could scarcely appraise” (310). Rather than dwell on the emperor’s skin color, the narrator shifts to the emperor’s thoughtfulness: Deva Raya gives Abdul-Razzaq, who was “perspiring profusely from the heat and all the clothes I was wearing” (because Abdul-Razzaq is not a “naked” local in a “loin-cloth”), the emperor’s own Chinese fan to use.

Fig. 4: Students draw a city plan of Vijayanagar, to visualize Vijayanagar’s districts and quarters

After this, the account moves to descriptions of betel-leaf and camphor, and the sheep, fowl, rice, oil, sugar, and gold that the emissary and his retinue receive as their daily allotment for their needs (311). Race-making, it seems, can be abandoned as a project when the alien other happens to be a bountiful, magnificent royal.

We bemusedly see that Abdul-Razzaq’s hauteur at difference can be overcome by magnificence and opulence, especially when he himself is the recipient of abundance. This black infidel, unlike those in Calicut, is robed in satin silk from Zaitun (Quanzhou), China, wearing a necklace of pearls of incalculable worth (no doubt from Ceylon/Sri Lanka), and fanning himself with a Chinese fan: a perfect picture of early globalism crystallized upon one person.

Other moments exist when Abdul-Razzaq’s abhorrence is similarly overridden, such as when he witnesses sculptural artistry and aesthetic beauty in South Asia. At Mangalore, he finds an “idol temple” with “a statue in the likeness of a human being, full stature, made of gold. It had two red rubies for eyes, so cunningly made that you would say it could see” (306). Rather than denounce this idol, the envoy is moved to exclaim: “What craft and artisanship!” (306).

In Pednur, the Timurid envoy finds “buildings and beauties” that were like “the houris and palaces of paradise,” innumerable flowers, cypresses that make him rhapsodize, verdant plane trees that draw poeticisms from him, and temple carvings of dark blue stone of exquisite intricacy and “extreme delicacy,” with “so many designs,” that he must break into verse twice (306–307).

It’s therefore crucial to discuss with students how art in the widest sense of the word, encompassing Quranic recitation in Ibn Fadlan, and temple architecture (see, e.g., Fig. 5) and artisanry in Abdul-Razzaq, as well as natural beauty – flowers, cypresses, and plane trees in India, the aurora borealis of the Eurasian steppe – can form bridges across difference in narratives of encounter where otherwise denigration and othering might occur.Footnote ⁷⁶ Students can be asked to find modern occasions when art and natural beauty also forge bridges across difference, resulting in the appreciation of otherness.

Fig. 5: A Vijayanagar temple with carvings, sculpture, and reliefs

Abdul-Razzaq’s admiration of beauty, of course, includes a lively admiration of female beauty. His gaze lingers on the courtesans of Vijayanagar, who are “quite young and extremely beautiful” who are ready for “pleasure, revelry and enjoyment” and “willing to dally with anyone” (310). The emissary reports a good deal about Vijayanagar’s brothels, from the fact that the lovely courtesans have serving women, to the safekeeping of “customers’ belongings” which, if lost while the customers are indulging themselves, are made good and compensated. The “beauty, blandishments, and attraction” of these courtesans may be sampled at “many similar brothels” of the city, apparently (311).

The Timurid is equally cow-eyed at female artistes – singers and dancers, but especially the dancers – at the Mahanavami festival, who have “cheeks like the moon … with beautiful garments and enchanting countenances like fresh roses” and who “dance in an astonishingly enchanting manner” (313), and offers up one of his more ecstatic verses:

Apparently, Abdul-Razzaq never saw beautifully performed Indian classical dance (bharatanatyam? See Fig. 6) before, so the ecstatic clamor here owes both to his effusive style and his discovery of yet another bridge across difference and otherness. Do ask students how they feel about these kinds of gendered, sexualized, and ambiguous bridges across difference.

Fig. 6: An Indian classical dancer of Bharatanatyam striking a pose

There is much in Vijayanagar to discuss – from disquisitions on India’s elephants and architecture, to what a global city in South Asia looks like, to the author’s opulent style and many poems, some of which are exquisite, while others are hyperbolically hilarious – but Abdul-Razzaq’s account is particularly useful for its eloquent descriptions of the experience of sea journeys for those who are not seasoned mariners.

Where Ibn Fadlan is expressive about extreme cold, and the grindingly slow progress of camel caravans across a landmass, Abdul-Razzaq is voluble on the terrors of sea journeys, the turbulence of the Indian ocean, monsoons dictating when and in which direction it is possible to travel; seasons of rampant piracy; and even “the smell of the ship” in one’s nostrils (300).

This terrified landlubber suffers from motion sickness, febrile fever, hallucinatory dreams, infections, and just about every ailment imaginable on his maritime journeys, to all of which he gives prolix testimony, and about which he issues profusely romantic lyric poetry. Likening himself to Moses cast on the waters, and to Al-Khizr, the Timurid ambassador quaveringly tells us he “gave up all hope of life” more than once (302).

Indeed, we are so volubly treated to the “terrors of a sea voyage,” and how it feels to be stranded when the monsoons do not cooperate, that students who had wondered what crossing an ocean was like for premodern peoples, and had wanted more from the Vinland Sagas’ terse, spare accounts of voyaging, have their curiosity more than amply satisfied in this text.

To satisfy curiosity about what it might be like to view oceans not as crucibles of ordeal and dread, but as roadways that join civilizations and cultures, I try to include in syllabi a unit on maritime worlds and societies, with at least one text ostensibly produced by mariners themselves. We turn next to sailors’ stories, merchants’ accounts of far-flung maritime trade, and the worlds of island Southeast Asia.

Teaching Buzurg ibn Shahriyar’s Book of the Wonders of India: Mainland, Sea and Islands

Accounts of caravan journeys and sea voyages address a question sometimes asked by students: Where do the luxury goods, silks, spices, gems, pearls, perfumes, porcelain, and rare delicacies that appear in medieval European romances, and the Arabian Nights, come from, and what can we know about them?

Buzurg ibn Shahriyar’s collection of stories, haphazardly told in no particular order or with any semblance of organization, shows us that the sailors who manned ocean-going vessels, and the merchants who accompanied cargoes from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Africa across the Indian Ocean and Bay of Bengal to the China sea and back, embarked on their long-distance journeys because of the gigantic profits and immense wealth to be gained from precious cargoes of luxury goods too heavy and massive to be transported by land caravans alone.Footnote ⁸⁰

These stories, narrated through what seems like free association, thus expressively convey the historical basis of the material luxuries depicted in recreational literature, serving as an accounting of sorts for how the extravagant tissue of material culture that imparts an aura of elite life in recreational literature is attained for the societies producing that literature.

The chatty sea captain from Ramhormuz shows us the terrible travails at sea that is the price of such commercial conveyance: perils from storms, gales, and giant waves that beggar description; sudden risk of enslavement, impoverishment, and death; bizarre monsters and creatures that rival any in the Arabian Nights. We see that the standard practice to save a ship in a tempest is to lighten it by tossing out its cargo: a survival strategy that means the loss of a fortune. So, once a fortune has indeed been made, mariners tell us with relief, “From that day on we have given up sailing” (45).

Despite the perils of using oceans as roads, however, some intrepid sailors are renowned for repeated trans-world voyaging. A certain Captain Abhara, who “sailed the sea in all directions,” makes the months-long route from the Gulf to China and back seven times (50): “No one had done it without an accident,” we are told, “If a man reached China without dying on the way, it was already a miracle. Returning safe and sound was unheard of. I had never heard tell of anyone [else] … who had made … two voyages there and back without mishap” (50).

We also learn, astonishingly, that cargo lost at sea might turn up again, to reward the virtuous, the pious, or the lucky – a story-trope that makes these mariners’ tales greatly resemble the Arabian Nights (e.g., 81–82, 84–86).

Fig. 7: The transglobal sea routes of the China trade

The ocean as a crucible of opportunity means we get to see how the enslaved persons we encounter in global literature might have become enslaved in the first place. Ismailawayh, a captain to whom several tales are attributed, relates a vignette in which he and others are blown off course to East Africa, to “Sofala on the Zanj coast” (31).Footnote ⁸¹ Initially terrified of the Africans – whom they deem “cannibal negroes” – the mariners are warmly and civilly welcomed. The African king graciously allows them to trade “without any hindrances or customs duties,” treating them with courtesy and generosity (31).Footnote ⁸²

Despite (or because of?) the king’s kindness, however, Captain Ismailawayh muses that “In the market in Oman this young king would certainly fetch thirty dinars, and his seven companions sixty each” (31). Like Thorfinn Karlsefni, Ismailawayh’s calculations quickly turn to international markets –  slave markets, this time. The mariners kidnap, enslave, and sell the African king and his people. Altogether, the text relates, Ismailawayh and his sailors sell about 200 slaves in Oman.

The story of this nameless African king eventually becomes a tale of his escape, conversion to Islam, and adventures that lead him home to resume his kingship, so that his tale becomes a parable of triumphal virtuous behavior, a parable again reminiscent of the Arabian Nights. The seamen meet him a second time, when they are again blown off course, and, terrified once more, become remorseful of their abhorrent behavior when he lessons them. The African king again behaves exemplarily, but expresses profound contempt for them.

So, this story turns on failed racist stereotypes about Black Africans, ethical versus execrable conduct, and divine providence. Students will also remark how medieval slavery depends on ad hoc opportunism. Initially expecting to be preyed on by the Zanj whom they malign, the mariners quickly become predators instead – economic cannibals preying on a virtuous king and his good people. Soberingly, East Africans as potential slaves is a repeating trope: In another story, one Ibn Lakis says the people of the Waq-waq islands attacked Qanbalu, because “they wanted to obtain Zanj, for they were strong and easily endured slavery” (103).Footnote ⁸³

Exercised whenever conditions allow it, opportunistic slavery – including enslaving children – appears fairly ubiquitous, and the buying and selling of humans, slaveholding, and slave revolts are narrated with some predictability (e.g., 7, 19–20, 18–21, 31–33). It seems that whenever a ship arrives, locals hide, for good reason, since sailors and merchants appear to treat all humans as acquirable commodities whenever they can.

And not merely humans: Monkeys are enslaved with some frequency and perform menial domestic tasks and hard labor and are also used for sex. One sex slave is a mermaid: Chained up for eighteen years after she fails to escape, she is forced to bear six children by her master, and, when finally released by her children on the death of their father, she flees for her life (19–21).

A usage mentality thus pervades many stories: Enslave people when you can, including children; eat and use animals any way you can, including using animals for sex; and take advantage of others before they take advantage of you. Like the Reference HaddawyArabian Nights, stories revolve around jealousy, competitiveness, and greed; with a few turning on exemplarily virtuous people. All manner of creatures appear – whales, turtles, fish, birds, snakes, crocodiles, ants – in behavior and sizes natural and monstrous.

Like the Reference HaddawyNights, these mariners’ tales also detail transgressive sexual practices, but the stories here are even more ribald. While the Reference HaddawyNights depict oversexed women, sibling incest, and hint at covert homoerotic behavior, these seamen’s tales feature explicit homoerotic overtures, the rape of women and sheep, bestiality with monkeys and fish that births hybrid creatures, a mermaid sex slave, and even sex with a statue, detected through the presence of the culprit’s semen on the statue (46, 82–83, 107, 40–41, 20, 19–21, 83).

Women, in these sailors’ tales and the Nights, are of course ready and eager for sex. While European romances depict castles of maidens that possibly derive from rumors about harems in the East, these seamen’s tales tell of “an island” where only women reside, so that sailors who are blown ashore are greeted by “a thousand women, or more” for each man, who “compelled them to become the tools of their pleasure” (16–17). The price of all this pleasure is that “The men died of exhaustion one after the other.” And, of course, the women all “want to dominate” men (17).

In the stories’ treatment of otherness, we hear about “cannibal Zanj” in Africa (104) and cannibal natives of the East Indies, but tellingly, the sole witnessed incident of (almost-)cannibalism involves mariners and merchants themselves. During a storm where a ship carrying cargo of “incalculable value” is lost, thirty-three men who get into a lifeboat are storm-tossed for five days, experiencing such hunger and thirst that they decide to eat “a very fat boy” whose father, like the captain, had gone down with the ship (97, 98). Fortuitously, this intended cannibalism is aborted when the boat washes ashore, and villagers arrive to succor everyone (98).

Cannibalism, often attributed as a marker to distinguish uncivilized peoples from civilized peoples, is a slippery identifier in these stories. These sailors’ tales can end up undercutting their trajectory of othering by pointing to execrable behavior exhibited by the sailors themselves rather than by the othered. See what students think about this.

Finally, our inescapable impression is that mariners go to sea because of cargoes. Pilgrims, envoys, and others may be passengers, but the oceanic waterways of the world beckon because of their promise of profit and wealth.

Teaching Abu Zayd al-Sirafi’s Reference Mackintosh-SmithAccounts of China and India

Abu Zayd al-Hasan al-Sirafi’s Reference Mackintosh-SmithAccounts of China and India is even more concerned with how profit accrues. Unlike the sea captain’s salty stories, Abu Zayd declares that his collection eschews mariners’ tales (133).Footnote ⁸⁴ Instead, the compilation delivers helpful descriptions of taxes, ports, merchandise, laws, and practical information like where freshwater can be found.

Nonetheless, encounters with foreign others still reliably produce cannibals. In the Andaman Islands, cannibals “eat anyone who passed by them” and eat them alive (27). Andaman cannibals “are black and have frizzy hair, with hideous faces and eyes” (27). Between Ceylon/Sri Lanka (“Sarandib”) and Kedah (“Kalah”) in coastal Malaya, there resides “a tribe of negroes who are naked and who, if they find anyone from outside their land, hang him upside down, cut him into pieces, and devour him raw” (35).Footnote ⁸⁵

These cannibal societies are doubly uncivilized, since they not only eat people, but one eats people alive, and the other eats people raw. Further east, in Sumatra (“al-Ramani”) where gold, sapan wood, and rattan are found (and where the thriving empire of Srivijaya dominated the region for six centuries), “a tribe who eat people” also exists (25, 27).

But cannibals aren’t just black and brown islanders in the Indian Ocean/Bay of Bengal/Andaman Sea/Straits of Malacca. Even China’s inhabitants – praised as “fine-looking … with clear, pale complexions,” and lauded as the world’s best craftsmen, engravers, and manufacturers (“no one from any other nation has the edge on them”), in a land extolled for law and order, sophisticated bureaucratic management, and boasting megalopolises of two million people – turn cannibal on occasion (55, 77).

“When one of the rulers under the command of the Great King [i.e., the Tang Emperor] acts unjustly … they slay him and eat him … . Chinese eat the flesh of all who are killed by the sword” (55, 77, 59). In the aftermath of Huang Chao’s rebellion, China’s warlords “eat all the defeated … people, cannibalism being permissible for them according to their legal code, for they trade in human flesh in their markets” (71). Chinese cannibalism, it seems, is punitive cannibalism, inflicted on unjust rulers and the people of defeated leaders.Footnote ⁸⁶

Between opportunistic slavery, and punitive cannibalism, the maritime Silk Road appears to encompass practices and zones that excel at turning humans into commodities and comestibles, according to sailors’ and merchants’ reports.

While not all cannibals are dark-skinned, and light-skinned Chinese are also cannibals, racial othering in Abu Zayd’s compilation seems to link pale skin with beauty, and black skin with ugliness. The pale-skinned Chinese are “a fine-looking people”; in Takka (“al-Taqa”) “women … are fair-skinned and … the most beautiful … in India”; and in Kashmir (? “Al-Kashibin”) “people are pale-skinned … and are good-looking” (55, 41, 43). But Andaman Islanders, who are black, have “frizzy hair, hideous faces and eyes” (27). The racial discourse in this compilation thus conjoins two tropes of othering: skin color and cannibalism.Footnote ⁸⁷

For merchants, however, even the extreme alterity of cannibalism can be overlooked when socioeconomic conditions favor profit and trade, and Abu Zayd’s compilation is full of admiration for Tang China’s bureaucracy, laws, and judicial system.

Tang bureaucracy ensures “Chinese act fairly where financial dealings or debts are concerned,” with debts being recorded on chirographs bearing finger marks (and seals?) and accreting a paper trail for repayment (51). Nonpayment triggers intensive investigation and draconian state punishment – a substantial monetary fine plus “twenty blows on the back with wooden staves,” enough to kill a man (53). If a debtor is genuinely bankrupt, however, a creditor is “paid what they are owed from the treasury” (53). With all this, and the state indemnifying loans, there is no need for “witnesses or oaths” in financial dealings (53).

Clearly, laws like this are of paramount importance to merchants who might otherwise lose money in less-regulated business transactions. China’s rules and regulations guarantee that business can be efficaciously transacted, and this report seems to believe the system is fair.

We learn that the state even indemnifies cargoes and merchandise that are lost. Port taxes are high: “three-tenths of the goods are taken in kind, as duty,” but the Emperor pays “the very highest prices” for merchandise he wants, “and pays immediately” (45). Rather than complain about the high port taxes, the narrator intones approvingly, “camphor, if the ruler had not bought it, would be only worth half that price on the open market” (45).

Indeed, the system is so laudable, the Emperor even punishes his own officials who mistreat merchants. Rather than have a Khurasani spread news of improper treatment in China, the Emperor admonishes an official who had confiscated the merchant’s property – “you exposed me to the risk of losing face,” the ruler scolds – and demotes his official for it (99, 101).

That misbegotten official, like others in charge of China’s treasury and the Emperor’s household and ports, is a eunuch slave (75). Students who are following enslaved people in global literature may remember that the vizier of Vijayanagar, who led Vijayanagar’s army to war against Muslim Gulbarga, was also a eunuch. We see again that in premodernity, the horrors of castration and slavery can ironically lead to high positions and power:

In short, the Tang Emperor’s exemplary behavior in safeguarding China’s reputation has Abu Zayd exclaim with admiration at “the status of the law and the high regard” Chinese have for law and order, despite their ascribed taint of cannibalism (101). The narrator even rhapsodizes over the selection of upright men for judges (103). Law and order, of course, ensures the smooth functioning of the Indian Ocean trade, and China’s access to foreign goods, international markets, and large profits.

Its mercantile gaze also means that this compilation is remarkable for the first foreign mention of tea-drinking in China, and the first foreign mention of porcelain made from white kaolin clay into the delicately fine cups and tableware (especially Xing and Ding white wares) for which Tang China was internationally renowned (49, 45).Footnote ⁸⁹

In sum, Tang China is presented as a shining model of precocious modernity four centuries before Polo-Rustichello present Yuan China as a shining model of precocious modernity. China even has universal literacy (“poor or rich, young or old, all learn how to form letters and to write”), because “every city has a school and a teacher to teach the poor how to write.” A welfare system ensures “children of the poor are fed from the public treasury,” and any man over eighty pays no tax but “is given a pension from the public treasury” (47, 55).

Universal healthcare sustains the poor: “if a sick person is poor, he is given the cost of his medicine from the public treasury” (55). The Emperor even guards food staples against inflation, releasing stocks from imperial granaries at half price when the cost of grain is too high (49). And Tang China has a pony express – well, a mule express – for sending communications around the country, much like the postal system Polo-Rustichello would describe in Yuan China (107).

Perhaps the most eye-opening example of China’s exemplary modernity is its legalization of sex work. The narrator himself is censorious about “women who do not wish to be virtuously married but prefer a life of sexual promiscuity” – as he tendentiously puts it – but the state merely has these women licensed by the chief of police, who records their ancestry, physical appearance, and place of residence (73). Duly registered, a sex worker then practices her profession freely and without hindrance: “she pays her dues annually, and no opprobrium attaches to her” (73).

Of course, Tang China’s modernity, like Yuan China’s, requires bureaucratic surveillance. A male child must be registered at birth, and men aged eighteen to eighty pay a poll tax, varying by “landed and other property that they own” (55). Girls and women go unmentioned, but the treasury’s daily revenue from the poll tax in Guangzhou (“Khanfu”) alone totals 50,000 dinars (49). State surveillance also requires two passport documents for travelers, so that identities and provenance can be checked at “guardposts on the road,” ensuring no “traveler’s money or goods … go missing” – which is no doubt reassuring to traveling merchants (51). For merchants, of course, state surveillance is a net positive, securing order, and favoring business.

Students thus see that a compilation concerned with mercantile interests has no difficulty discovering bridges across difference. Even if there’s cannibalism – an abhorrent marker of difference – Tang China is a shining vision of modernity, admired for its law and order, surveillance system, and state institutions that ensure the smooth functioning of business. Sometimes, bridges across differences are forged in ways and for reasons we do not expect. What do students make of it?

Abu Zayd’s compilation also describes what Abdul-Razzaq’s account of India omits, but that texts often find striking and iconic about India: cremation on funeral pyres, sati, the caste system, sadhus, and even devadasis – a temple-based system of female sexual service or “prostitution” that bewilders the narrator as much as legalized sex work in China (57, 59, 117, 119). Students can compare how sex workers in Vijayanagar, and in Abu Zayd’s India and China, are portrayed.

Both books of the compilation also list the greatest rulers of the world in order of their importance – a weighing of regnal magnitude articulated, ostensibly, by the Chinese themselves (Book One) or voiced by the Tang Emperor (Book Two). Unsurprisingly, the Abbasid Caliph emerges as the paramount ruler on the planet. Book One names “the king of the Arabs” as the “mightiest, the richest in possessions, and the most resplendently fine in appearance,” as well as “king of the great religion to which nothing is superior” (39). Next in greatness comes the Emperor of China, then “the Byzantine king,” followed by a (Deccan?) king of India dubbed “Balhara” (39).

Book Two has the Tang Emperor himself declare he only considers five kings in the world to be truly great. The Abbasids again take the trophy: “The one with the most extensive realm is he who rules Iraq, for he is at the center of the world, and the other kings are ranged around him” (81). Next, the Tang Emperor considers himself second best, followed by the king of the Turks, the king of India, and the king of Byzantium (79, 81).

What is useful for students to see, in these lists of the greats, is that no king of Latin Europe appears anywhere on the horizon at all. If a key aim of teaching global literature is to decenter Europe, this text is a helpful aid in showing how little the Latin West and its kings figured in the estimation of the great trading empires and networks of the premodern world.

Abu Zayd’s is thus a highly useful text to teach. Not only does it trace the routes of the maritime Silk Road, from the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and Africa, all the way to China, but it offers uncommon glimpses of the ports and polities of island Southeast Asia.Footnote ⁹⁰ For an elaboration of those island societies, we turn next to a global text in classical Malay: the Sejarah Melayu, or Malay Annals.Footnote ⁹¹

Teaching the Malay Annals

Of the two dozen or so texts in this Element from which to build a syllabus, sadly only a handful are written by a people about themselves. More often, the texts are authored by visitors – diplomats, traders, sailors, missionaries – who render a society from the outside. Too often, these visitors also scarcely refrain from pejorative commentary on the peoples and societies they visit, which are so unlike their own.

By contrast, the Reference Heng and HengMalay Annals (translated by C. C. Brown), like the epic of Mali, is narrated by those who are native to the land. It charts how a regional kingdom – the Malacca Sultanate, in peninsular Malaya – arises out of the volatile politics of rival powers in the Malay Archipelago: especially the old empire of Srivijaya (see Fig. 8), based on the island of Sumatra (with its capital at Palembang), and on the decline in the thirteenth century and after, and the upstart, new empire of Majapahit, based on the island of Java, and on the ascendent.Footnote ⁹²

Fig. 8: Map of the Empire of Srivijaya

The Annals highlights a maritime world, a world of islands and archipelagos. A maritime world is a world in motion, where there is a constant movement of people from place to place, island to island. The stories spread across territories that are today part of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore, linking all these territories back to India and to the great cultural, religious, and linguistic impact of India upon island Southeast Asia, but also back to the Near East, and the Mediterranean, through the global spread of Islam, and the global prestige of the Alexander legend. This is a text that moves through time, and space, in establishing globalism.

Considered “the finest literary work in Malay” (ix), the Annals, like the epic of Mali, was set down late, in modern times, from oral traditions. The manuscript on which the English translation is based (Raffles M. S. 18, Library of Royal Asiatic Society, London) is thought by the translator to derive from around 1612, when a Bendahara (chief minister, akin to a vizier) supposedly set down the text – though ultimately “we are still in the dark as to when exactly it was written” (xxiv–xxv, xi).Footnote ⁹³

Since my focus is globalism, rather than the history of the Malacca Sultanate, I teach the first six chapters of this thirty-one-chapter text, which highlight as their paramount focus the lively dispersal of peoples, and the creation of intercultural and geopolitical relations among them.

Those six chapters are replete with cultural, social, and historical detail, and attest an intense desire for connection to the deep past, and to the geopolitical cultures of the many Asias. Indeed, the Annals begins not in island Southeast Asia at all, but in India, with a union between a victorious Alexander the Great (here in his Arabic incarnation as Iskandar Zulkarnain) and a princess whose father’s name, Raja Kida Hindi, eponymously recalls all India (India, in Arabic texts, is al-Hind).Footnote ⁹⁴

The Malay text’s lively embrace of the Alexander legend underscores the global reach of the Macedonian world-conqueror’s legendary reputation and the eagerness of far-flung polities to claim descent from him for their kings (see, especially, Ng).

In this version of his legend, Alexander/Iskandar successfully conquers India, and is given a beautiful and brilliant Indian princess with “no peer,” “no equal,” for wife (2, 3). He abundantly showers robes of honor and treasure upon her and her father, like a munificent Mughal potentate; then, after the marriage, goes off to do more world-conquering, but returns his new wife to her father, who misses her.

A connection to the world-conqueror having been established, the Indian princess births a son and begins a genealogy of begats that will link all successive rajas in her line to the great Iskandar/Alexander (4–5). Princesses, in the Annals, are consistently depicted as magnificent conduits for pedigreed descent from key historical luminaries and their empires. Some are named, and elaborately lauded, like this foremother who births Iskandar’s/Alexander’s Indian son, while others remain nameless and disappear from the narrative when their reproductive role is complete.

A keen-eyed student may notice from this early example of women-as-reproductive-conduits that the Annals has a different relationship to the body from most premodern texts. The way the princess knows she is pregnant is because “she did not menstruate,” telling her father, “I have had no menses now for two months” (5). Ask your students: What other historical text(s) do they know of, where menstruation is so explicitly mentioned, and what do they make of this?

Beyond menstruation, bodily practices of an intimate, personal kind repeatedly appear. The Malayan slave Badang, a key figure in the premodern history of Singapore, acquires his superhuman strength when a demon (or jinn?) grants him a wish, but must eat the creature’s vomit to gain his power (25). When Islam comes to the islands, a key character has a dream in which the Prophet Mohammad spits into his mouth, producing a fragrance like spikenard (32–33). A king of the Malacca Sultanate also has a dream about the Prophet and awakes to discover that he has been circumcised (43)! Proof – of authenticity, of the transference of power, of genuine change – must be visited on the body or involve intimate body-to-body relations.

A lack of prudery about the body and bodily practices is also clear from ceremonial bathing and purification in court rituals. The coronation of Sri Tri Buana/Sang Nila Utama,Footnote ⁹⁵ the descendent of Iskandar/Alexander who becomes the new king at Palembang, along with his new queen, centrally involves a lustration ceremony, when the royal couple is publicly bathed, and clothed in new apparel before they are invested with the insignia of sovereignty (17).

Overall, global interconnections turn on folkloric, literary, and religious relations of multiple kinds, in a warp-and-weave of textual details. The insistence that Southeast Asia’s kings are descended from Iskandar/Alexander, for instance, is vouched for by the behavior of descendants who act just like their famous ancestor. Raja Chulan, the descendant who fathers Sri Tri Buana, even repeats Alexander’s legendary adventure of descending into the ocean in a premodern bathysphere – here, a “glass case,” lowered by a golden chain (11).

Like the story of Jullanar and the Sea in the Arabian Nights, Chulan discovers there exists a well-populated undersea kingdom with a vast city and its own raja. Naturally, he is given a beautiful princess to marry, and he has three sons with her; when he decides to leave after three years – because he must go on to found a dynasty at “Bija Nagara” and remarry (sharp-eared students will instantly recognize Vijayanagar in this name) – Chulan leaves instructions for his sons to ascend to the surface when they grow to manhood, “so that the kingdom of Raja Iskandar Dzu’l-Karnain may not pass away but may continue for all time” (12).Footnote ⁹⁶

The Annals’ ambitions are blazingly clear: Not only are the Malay kings genetically descended from Alexander the Great, but their legendary histories are also culturally interwoven with that glorious vehicle of Near Eastern story-making, the Reference HaddawyArabian Nights. To emphasize this, Raja Chulan is flown out of the ocean by a “winged stallion,” like the winged flying horse of the Third Dervish’s Tale in the Nights story of the Porter and the Three Ladies.

The Annals never forgets, however, that Southeast Asia’s ties to Iskandar are twinned with deep genetic, cultural, and historical ties to India. Again and again, as the Annals unfurls its stories, India is never far from textual attention. Elephants, betelnut, clothing, words from Indian languages, will all recall the vast interconnective tissue between India and the islands.Footnote ⁹⁷

Southeast Asia’s rajas will also marry Indian princesses, including from Bija Nagara/Vijayanagar; and Southeast Asia’s champions, like Singapore’s strongman and war-chief, Badang, will compete with India’s champions (and beat them handily in competitions of strength and strategy, attesting to successful translatio imperii).

The Annals’ stories, then, map far-ranging relations for island Southeast Asia in a compressed and fluid timeline in which millennia or centuries are transmogrified into mere generations of royal descent: relations that unfold from the Mediterranean of the Iskandar/Alexander legend and the Arabian Nights to India; from India to Sumatra when Raja Chulan’s sons emerge from their undersea home; thence to the Riau archipelago, after the youngest, most important son, Sang Nila Utama, is crowned ruler at the old imperial capital of Palembang; thereafter to the new capital of Temasek/Singapore that he founds, a capital that thrives and prospers, achieving world renown, and that must be defended from Majapahit in Java by his descendants; and eventually to the new Malacca Sultanate in peninsular Malaya, after Temasek/Singapore is lost, generations afterward, by its last king, Iskandar Shah.

When Islam is recorded as arriving in island Southeast Asia, and disseminates across the archipelago, yet another axis of globalism appears in the Annals.

By this point of the syllabus, students can see the whole massive network of global Islam traced across the texts of the semester: a spread that extends from Mali in West Africa, up the Volga to the Eurasian steppes, across North Africa/the Middle East/the Mediterranean, to India of the Ghaznavids, Gulbarga, and the Mughals, throughout island Southeast Asia, and all the way to China, where large Muslim mercantile communities are resident in the major port-cities (and murdered in Guangzhou during Huang Chao’s rebellion, as Abu Zayd reports).

The Annals’ mapping of all these global relationships, whether of a religious, historical, legendary, or sociocultural kind, is lively and engaging. One example is a charming episode narrating the emergence of Raja Chulan’s sons from the undersea kingdom, when they’ve grown to adulthood, to establish the trajectory of translatio imperii from India to Sumatra. The story unfolds, not from the viewpoint of the young royal scions at all, but begins with two widows of Palembang, Wan Empok and Wan Malini, who plant rice (padi) on a hill called Bukit Si-Guntang Mahameru.Footnote ⁹⁸

One night, the widows see “a glow as of fire” on the hill. Hastening there fearfully, because it might be “the gleam of the gem on some great dragon’s forehead,” they climb the hill only to find that all the rice had “golden grain, leaves of silver and stems of gold alloy,” and the entire crest of the hill “had turned into gold” (13–14).

There, the widows behold “three youths of great beauty” who were “adorned like kings and wore crowns studded with precious stones, and they rode upon white elephants” (14). The beautiful, brilliantly adorned youths assure the widows they are neither faery nor jinn but are “descended from Raja Iskandar Dzu’l-Karnain” (14).

As proof (proof matters to this text), they point to the transformation of the hilltop and rice, and relate the story of their ancestry from “the marriage of Raja Iskandar with Raja Kida Hindi’s daughter and … the descent of Raja Chulan into the sea;” their crowns are the sign they are “of the stock of Raja Iskandar Dzu’l-Karnian” (14).Footnote ⁹⁹

Their Alexandrian lineage has now been mentioned three times, buttressing the assertion of a translation of rule. The widows are “filled with joy,” and take the princes home with them – a poignant touch, since the widows’ domestic circumstances are presumably humble and unworthy of hosting royal guests.

The entire episode is cinematic, with a delightfully staged mise-en-scène: Two old, widowed rice farmers suddenly encounter three unknown, dazzling, princely beings on a hill where everything has magicalized into gold and silver – a scene as worthy of the Arabian Nights as Hollywood. The contrast of youth with age, and opposite socioeconomic classes and stations in life, is psychologically satisfying; and the text, it seems, even cares what happens to the widows: “Wan Empok and Wan Malini became rich because of their meeting with the princes” (14).

News about the royal youths spreads, and the king of Palembang, Demang Lebar Daun, goes to the widows’ home to meet the princes, whereupon “every ruler from every part of the country” follows suit, and people decide to make the eldest youth the raja of Menangkabau, the next eldest the raja of Tanjong Pura, while the youngest ascends to the throne at Palembang when Demang Lebar Daun decides to abdicate in his favor, and become the youth’s chief minister instead (14–15).

The widows, moreover, are not forgotten. They possess a silvery white cow, which spews foam from its mouth, from which a human being emerges, who bestows Sang Utama with a new title, “Sri Tri Buana,” Lord of the Three Worlds, addressing him as “Sri Maharaja” – the radiant, supreme king of the land (15). This new king becomes “famous as a ruler; and all mankind, male and female, came from every part of the country to pay their homage to him” (15).

Yet another story echoing the Reference HaddawyArabian Nights follows: Sri Tri Buana takes one beautiful princess after another for his consort, but each, “when she slept with the king,” is stricken with chloasma the next morning, so he abandons thirty-nine princesses in succession (15).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The king then asks for the hand of his new chief minister’s daughter, Wan Sendari, whose beauty “had no equal in those days” (15–16).

This memento from the Reference HaddawyNights’ frame tale serves a different purpose, however, from Shahrazad’s story. Here, the chief minister uses the occasion to bind the new king and all his royal descendants to a covenant. Under the terms of the pact, the king and his descendants must treat the minister and his descendants fairly, in return for their loyalty, and must never disgrace or revile them with evil words, though grave offenses remain punishable by death, in accordance with law.

The king agrees, adding a self-serving proviso: “your descendants shall never for [the] rest of time be disloyal to my descendants, even if my descendants oppress them and behave evilly” (16). The minister carefully agrees, but in words that reestablish causal priority: “But if your descendants depart from the terms of the pact, then so will mine” (16). The Annals sets down these terms as an irrevocable covenant:

The precautions taken by Demang Lebar Daun are one example of the wisdom and prudence of chief ministers in the Annals, a text that may have been composed or set down by a chief minister. Over and over, in the Annals, chief ministers’ wisdom, sagacity, and courage save imprudent and fatuous kings from disaster. The canny intelligence of chief ministers in India, China, and Southeast Asia, wins wars, prevents invasions, and ransoms kings from captivity; ungrateful kings who do not appreciate their ministers tend to come to a poor end in the Annals.

This compact binding the ruler of the land and his descendants, negotiated over a bride, therefore inserts a foreshadowing explanation for the eventual loss of Singapore to Java, when a royal descendant of Sri Tri Buana behaves badly over a woman, and the woman’s father, who is one of the ruler’s chief men, betrays all to the Majapahit empire, when the terms of the covenant between ruler and ministerial subject utterly break down.

Wan Sendari does not develop melasma when she sleeps with the king, indicating she is the prefect consort. Their ceremonial lustration requires the building of a seven-tier bathing pavilion with five spires, as well as forty days and nights of feasting, drinking, and entertainment, the investiture festivities being attended by princes, ministers, courtiers, heralds, war-chiefs and all the people, and celebrated with music, food, and herds of slaughtered animals.

Thereafter, Sri Tri Buana sets out to found a new city, on ships crowding the seas: a golden ship for the menfolk, a silver one for the queen, each minister and war-chief with their own craft, and the fleet so vast, their masts “were like a forest of trees, their pennons and streamers were like driving clouds and the state umbrellas of the Rajas like cirrus” (17–18).

This, it seems, is how the courts of island worlds travel: in a vast fleet of “royal yachts, ships for sleeping, ships for the menfolk, wherries that were paddled, kitchen boats, dug-outs for fishing with the casting-net and floating bath-houses … with a countless host of escorting vessels” so that “the sea seemed to be nothing but ships” (19, 18).

The road to the founding of Singapore first leads to the island of Bintang (“Bentan”) in the Riau-Lingga archipelago, where a queen, Wan Sri Benian, or Sakidar Shah (her name in another tradition), welcomes and adopts Sri Tri Buana as her son, in a diplomatic extension of manufactured kin relations that here serves political relations, and becoming so fond of him that she installs him as her successor (18–29).

Next, leaving Bintang,Footnote ¹⁰¹ the court arrives at Tanjong Bemian, and, while the queen and her womenfolk picnic and gather shellfish, the king follows a deer he is hunting, climbs a rock and sights a land with a beach with “sand so white that it looked like a sheet of cloth” (19).Footnote ¹⁰² Intrigued, the king is told the name of the island is Temasek; and he decides to sail there. Enroute, however, a storm arises, his ship fills with water, and the boatswain announces “it is because of the crown of kingship that the ship is foundering” since all else has been thrown overboard to lighten the ship (20).Footnote ¹⁰³

Unhesitatingly, the king flings his crown overboard: “the storm abated, and the ship regained her buoyancy and was rowed to land” (20). Scholars understand this act of crown-discarding as the moment at which the old sovereignty of Srivijaya is symbolically given up, superseded by a new sovereignty expressing renewal and resurgence, when a brand-new capital is founded in Singapore by a youthful new king, Sri Tri Buana.

The naming of that new capital is a story every school child in Singapore knows. Arriving in Temasek, the king sees a strange beast, “strong and active in build,” with a red body, a black head, and a white breast, and nobody can tell him what it is. His chief minister, who had been the old king at the old Srivijayan capital, tells him, “in ancient times it was a lion that had that appearance” (20).

The new king then decides to rename Temasek Singapura – Sanskrit for “lion city” – and establish his capital there: “And Singapura became a great city, to which foreigners resorted in large numbers so that the fame of the city and its greatness spread throughout the world” (21).Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Sri Tri Buana dies in the fullness of time, and is buried, along with his faithful chief minister, at Bukit Larangan (“Forbidden Hill,” later renamed Fort Canning, by the British Colonial Administration) in Singapore.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Majapahit, whose king had married the daughter of Sri Tri Buana’s elder brother who had been given Tanjong Pura to rule, soon tests the royal successor, Sri Tri Buana’s eldest son. Majapahit’s king is puissant – “So great was his kingdom that every prince in the land of Java was subject to him, as was half of the princes of Nusantara [i.e. the Malay Archipelago]” – because in the fourteenth century, Majapahit is an ascendant empire indeed (22).

Fig. 9: Royal gold jewelry excavated from Bukit Larangan/Fort Canning in Singapore

A fascinating contest of insults and boasts is exchanged between the envoys of both polities through gifts of heavy-handed symbolism that vaunt the unique talents of each populace, after which Majapahit invades with “a hundred ships and small craft without number” (23). A great battle ensues, where on “either side many were killed and the ground flowed with blood,” but ends with the Javanese returning home without success (23). Singapore does not fall.

Instead, premodern Singapore enters its heyday. The king of Bija Nagara/Vijayanagar gives his beautiful daughter as wife for the Singapore ruler’s son, thereby directly linking Singapore with a famed Indian empire. That son in turn ascends to kingship on his sire’s death (24). The relationship between the old world and the new one, proves ineluctably competitive, however; and a champion is sent by India to test the mettle of Singapore’s champions: but Badang, the former slave from Malaya with superhuman strength, is now a war-chief of Singapore, and easily bests the Indian champion in feats of strength.

Their capstone contest involves a massive boulder, which the Indian champion fails to lift, but which Badang handily lifts and hurls (see Fig. 10 for a reenactment), landing the boulder by the mouth of the Singapore River (27).

Fig. 10: A simulation of Badang lifting the Singapore Stone, National Day Parade, Singapore, 2016

Believed originally to span three meters in height and width, this boulder, today known as the Singapore Stone, became a casualty of the British Empire, when it was blown to pieces in the nineteenth century by the British Colonial Administration and used as building material for British living quarters and fortifications. A fragment of the boulder fortuitously survives, bearing an inscription: fifty lines in the Kawi script (Old Javanese) which have yet to be fully deciphered; that slab of rock is today an exhibit at the National Museum of Singapore.

Badang also stretches a chain across the Singapore River,Footnote ¹⁰⁶ to act “as a boom and restrict the passage of ships in and out,” and accomplishes other legendary feats, including launching a ship twelve fathoms long that even a few hundred men could not launch, and beating a champion sent by the king of Perlak in an informal trial of strength where Badang’s tact and diplomacy skillfully averts war (26–29).

When Singapore does fall, then, it is not because of military weakness or the deficiencies of its war-chiefs, but because a feckless king makes a foolish mistake.

The tragedy is prepared for by first showing us the poor behavior of kings. For instance, the Reference Heng and HengAnnals has it that Singapore was once attacked by swordfish that speared and killed many people, until a boy cannily suggests that a palisade of tree trunks (“banana stems”) be erected, so that the pointed bills of the fish would be stuck in the palisade. The suggestion saves Singapore, but the king of the time has the boy killed, in case such an imaginative child should grow up to be “a clever man” who might prove dangerous (40).Footnote ¹⁰⁷

That king’s son, Iskandar Shah, proves even more unwise than his father, when, as king, he decides to punish one of his favorite concubines, a very beautiful woman, because of hearsay attributed by the Reference Heng and HengAnnals to “the king’s womenfolk,” who “spoke ill of her” and accuse her of “misconduct.” The accused woman’s father is no ordinary subject, but a Treasury official holding the title Sang Ranjuna Tapa: Nonetheless, Iskandar Shah has the woman “publicly exposed at one end of the market,” punishing her in sexualized terms, to the anger of her father (41).Footnote ¹⁰⁸

The intimation in this episode, it seems, is that the king’s womenfolk (out of jealousy?) have accused the beautiful concubine of sexual misconduct, for which the king then devises a sexualized punishment: having her stripped naked, and exposed to public gawking and humiliation.

The father avenges his disgraced daughter by writing to Majapahit and offering to aid an invasion, and Majapahit responds by sending a fleet of 300 ships, “together with countless galleys, commissariat craft and dugouts” and 200,000 Javanese fighting men (41). After days of battle, “Sultan Iskandar Shah ordered the Treasury to issue rice for the provisioning of the troops but Sang Ranjuna Tapa replied that there was no rice left” (41). At dawn, the vengeful father opens the gates of the fortified city, and “so many were killed on either side that blood flowed like a river in spate and flooded the fort of Singapura on the sea shore” (41).

“And the men of Singapura were defeated, and Sultan Iskandar Shah fled” (41). The Reference Heng and HengAnnals follows the defeated sultan into peninsular Malaya, till he arrives at Malacca, where he decides to stay and build a new kingdom. The rest of chapter 6 then narrates the establishment of the new court, with lists of sumptuary decrees, ceremonial rites and rituals, diplomatic procedures, and the titles and duties of the chief ministers – the Bendahara, Temenggong, and Laksamana – in what will become the Malacca Sultanate, and the following chapters narrate the Sultanate’s history up to Portuguese colonization in 1511.Footnote ¹⁰⁹

In the fall of Singapore, then, women are blamed, for accusing one of their own, a concubine who is a king’s favorite, with the feckless king then arranging a particularly nasty punishment for his ex-favorite that outrages her father to the point that he sets in motion actions that result in the destruction of the kingdom. The old compact between king and officials, agreed upon by the first ruler of Singapore and his chief minister to ensure fair treatment on both sides of a power equation, breaks down, we see, because of the calumny of a woman by other women, and a king’s design of a humiliating punishment for the calumniated.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Students will be familiar with gender accusations that blame women for the fall of kingdoms and empires, of course, from literary texts of many kinds, in many eras. But if they are disheartened at the portrayal of women in the texts of the semester, our ending the semester with the Mongols will soften their dismay a little.

Teaching The Secret History of the Mongols

The extraordinary Mongolian epic known as The Secret History of the Mongols is the only “genuine … native account” of the life and deeds of Genghis Khan and the genealogy and history of his “Golden Family,” who are the epic’s intended audience (xxv). This thirteenth-century text also, of course, narrates the origins, genealogies, and interrelated histories of the most important personages, clans, and societies on the steppe that intertwine with the history of Genghis Khan.Footnote ¹¹³

A productive approach for teaching the Secret History might be to ask: What were the early conditions that allowed for Genghis Khan’s emergence and survival in the first place, hence enabling his later empire with its renowned globalism, to have a chance to begin at all?

Approaching the epic in this way foregrounds the important roles of women in the text. It also allows us to concentrate on teaching the first three chapters to undergraduates, constituting about 45 percent of the numbered sections in this dense twelve-chapter text, since these are the chapters establishing the values, attitudes, and practices that are foundational for all the later events, so that the text can then go on thereafter to narrate conquest after conquest in the successive nine chapters.Footnote ¹¹⁴

The Secret History begins with the ancestors of the Mongols: a blue-grey wolf and a fallow deer. Students familiar with the origin stories of Indigenous peoples in other lands, especially in nomad and semi-nomad societies, will not find the possession of totemic animal ancestors at all strange, but a powerful way to catch at the close intimacy of human–animal interconnection in societies where dependency on animals is key to human survival.Footnote ¹¹⁵

As the narration begins a line of begats, we see that when persons are named, horses make an appearance at the same time: There was such-and-such a man, and he had such-and-such a horse. Geldings, mares, equines of all colors, with mangy or bobbed tails, stripes along their backs, are routinely described, so that family, clan, and tribal wealth are seen to be reckoned by the number of horses and herds possessed.

Mongols, of course, not only ride, but also drink, eat, and wear their horses. Kumiss, fermented mares’ milk, is a food staple; horse hide becomes shoes, cuirasses, clothing; horsehair becomes rope; horse guts are the strings of the horsehead fiddle; horse dung is useful for fuel. No part of the animal is wasted: Mongols clearly respect their steeds but do not sentimentalize or romanticize them, as knights do in European romances. Life on the steppe is so harsh, the papal legate John of Plano Carpini says in his Hystoria Mongalorum, that Mongols eat just about everything that lives, including the placenta of mares and even lice (Race 294).

Students can be asked to consider the roles of animals-as-surrogates in the semester’s epics, such as the owls in Sundiata who carry taunts, boasts, and threats between the warring Sunjata and Sumaoro, or Bodoncar’s hawk in the History, who catches prey for him, which he and the bird share, so that both are able to survive on the steppes.

Sharp-eyed students will notice that grain scarcely makes an appearance in this epic: No heaps of rice are harvested here for celebrations, but roasted fowl, deer and game, field animals, fish, and herds are what feed people – who, in desperate circumstances, will also eat roots, bulbs, and leaves. The lack of plant agriculture and the reliance on animal husbandry and transhumance helps bring home the realities of nomad societies, where even alcoholic beverages come from animals, not plants.

The steppes constitute an exceptionally harsh world. Here is an environment where not only martial skill and violence, but equally resilience, courage, determination, pragmatism, and ingenuity – qualities possessed in abundance by women – are the prime strengths. Sociality is all-important, too, and despite divisions in families, especially among brothers, the imperative of companionship and allies is an overriding condition for survival. To be cast off from society, and alone on the steppes, is to face probable death.

Key values surface early in the epic and are often performed by the example of iconic women. Earliest among these is Genghis’ ancestress, Alan Qoa (“Alan the Fair”), who, after two sons with her late husband, births three more sons when she is a widow. Accused of sexual impropriety, she declares that the three sons are the result of visitations by a celestial being, a resplendent yellow (i.e., golden) man who came to her nightly through the smoke hole of her yurt, departing on a moonbeam or sun’s ray as a yellow (golden) dog (I: 4).Footnote ¹¹⁶

Alan Qoa’s extraordinary explanation for the origins of her seemingly illegitimate sons is trusted absolutely and without question, signaling this remarkable ancestress’s exceptionality, and authority.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Her words then constitute the basis of the future Genghis’ perceived favor from heaven: A woman has ab origine conferred celestial ancestry, and heaven’s mandate, upon the future world-conqueror (I: 264).

As importantly, this foundational ancestress lays down instruction to her five sons in a dictate whose truth will echo down the generations. She teaches them that five arrows, bound together, cannot be broken, whereas a single arrow breaks easily, a lesson that survival is only possible if an individual is part of a group that holds together.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Positioned early in the epic, her instruction casts a long shadow, and Genghis’ career will see him prize loyalty as a sine qua non among followers, even as he himself is disloyal to allies only after he has the strategic strength of numbers.

The woman who looms largest in the foundational chapters of the History, however, is Genghis’ mother, Hoelun, who is awarded the honorific, Lady Hoelun, then Mother Hoelun, early in the epic.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Her abduction by Yisugei, Genghis’ father, ripping her from her betrothed, a Merkit, is a chilling reminder of female vulnerability, bride-capture being commonplace on the steppe (I: 11–12). We see from an earlier abduction initiated by Alan Qoa’s son Bodoncar, that even pregnant women are not exempt from forcible capture that conscripts them as wives and concubines for their captors (I: 7–8).Footnote ¹²⁰ But if bride-capture – like raiding – is part of the socioeconomy of the steppe, we also witness Hoelun’s formidable resilience, as her actions secure the survival of the future Genghis Khan.

When Temujin, the future Genghis, is a boy of nine, his father Yisuge is poisoned by vengeful Tatars with whom Yisuge incautiously socializes on his way home after having found Temujin a bride among the Onggirat (I: 16).Footnote ¹²¹ With the paterfamilias dead, the family’s kin and tribe abandon Hoelun, her co-wife, their combined seven children, and at least one elderly servant, who must fend for themselves in an inhospitable environment without the safety of a large protective group of kin and community.Footnote ¹²² Nonetheless, raising aloft the standard of her late husband’s clan, Hoelun bravely rides forth to bring back her people, but only half return with her, and these folks do not stay, but abandon her family again.

A long, beautiful poem follows, where the History sings of Hoelun’s courage and tenacity in protecting her small family. She girds herself with the symbols of her authority, her boqta, a tall, elaborate headdress worn by married women of high rank (see Fig. 12), and, tightening her belt (another symbol of authority) and hoisting up her skirts, poignantly begins the process of gathering humble famine foods – crab apples and bird cherries, roots, wild garlic, wild onion, lily bulbs, and leeks – to feed her family, while her sons fish for “mean and paltry fish” (I: 19–20).Footnote ¹²³

Fig. 12: A high-ranking married Mongol woman’s boqta, a symbol of rank and authority

In this environment of terrible scarcity and precarity, Temujin and his brother Qasar horrifically commit fratricide, killing their half-brother Bekter, the son of Yisuge’s other wife, over the pretext of quarreling over a dace and a lark (I: 20–21). Despite (or because of) textual restraint in narrating this episode – students can be asked to compare the History’s spareness with the Vinland Sagas’ – pathos pervades the episode.

Bekter, who is guarding the family’s small herd of nine horses, suspects he is going to be killed, when he sees Temujin and Qasar stealthily approach. Quietly, he reminds his half-brothers of their precarious circumstances, their inability to avenge their abandonment, and how alone they are. Summoning up the memory of Alan Qoa’s allegory of the five arrows, he asks why his brothers consider him “a lash in the eye, a thorn in the mouth,” when they have “no friend but [their] shadow … no whip but [their] horse’s tale.”Footnote ¹²⁴ He pleads, not for his life, but for them to spare his brother Belgutei, then, sitting cross-legged, awaits their arrows (I: 20–21, I: 367–368).

Reference De RachewiltzDe Rachewiltz suggests that this fratricide, so expressive of ruthlessness at a tender age, strategically rids Temujin of a future rival in his family (I: 347). Nonetheless, Hoelun excoriates her sons for the sibling murder: “You … have destroyed life!” (I: 21, I: 368). “Hoelun’s Lament” – “a beautiful and powerful piece of early Mongol poetry” (I: 368) – recalls how Temujin emerged from Hoelun’s womb clutching a clot of blood – that is, with blood on his hands, a foretaste of mercilessness (I: 21).Footnote ¹²⁵ Likening her son to a savage, uncontrollable animal – a panther, lion, dragon-snake, gerfalcon, wolf, jackal, tiger – and unnatural beasts, Hoelun’s tongue-lashing crescendos, “You have destroyed!” (I: 21). “Citing old sayings, / Quoting ancient words, [Hoelun] mightily reviled her sons” (I: 22).Footnote ¹²⁶

We are not told what Temujin learns from Hoelun’s tongue-lashing, but as an adult, we see him turn to his mother for her counsel, when he must decide if he and his men should follow or leave his anda, Jamuqa, and Jamuqa’s men (I: 45–46).Footnote ¹²⁷

Once Temujin’s conquests begin, we see Hoelun in a new role, adopting and raising children from conquered tribes, a process that transforms the children of the defeated into future loyal retainers for her son, her first adoptee being “a little boy of five with fire in his eyes,” after Temujin’s first conquest (I: 43).

Hoelun’s impact thus continues after her son is no longer a child. In chapter 10 of the History, when Temujin harshly mistreats and humiliates his brother Qasar, Hoelen travels all night to her sons, and again in fury excoriates her eldest (I: 168–170). The text says, “surprised by the mother descending upon him,” Genghis “became afraid of her” (I: 169).

Again, issuing a tongue-lashing in verse, Hoelun performs a dramatic gesture that students may be familiar with from depictions of furious mothers in medieval European literature: She bares her breasts to remind her sons they have nursed from the same maternal breasts and share the same mother (I: 169). Meant to shame misbegotten sons into better behavior, this maternal breast-bearing and fury have the desired effect: Genghis confesses, “I was afraid of mother getting so angry and really became frightened; and I felt shame and was really abashed” (I: 170).Footnote ¹²⁸

Borte, Temujin’s first (and chief) wife is another crucial personage who lays the groundwork for his early survival. When we first meet her, she and Temujin are characterized in identical terms: Both are children radiant with promise, bearing light in their face, and fire in their eyes (I: 14–15).

A year older, Borte is from a tribe who sees their daughters as their chief strength, and a charming poem tells of how the Onggirat do not bother with power struggles or strive “for dominion,” because their daughters are so much in demand that the tribe’s safety is ensured by their women who become khatuns and the tribe’s protectors (I: 14–15).Footnote ¹²⁹

Marriage to Borte brings a treasure indispensable for cementing a key alliance at the first stage of Temujin’s military career. Borte’s bridal gift – a wedding present from her mother to Hoelun – is a magnificent black sable coat. The first thing of real value the family possesses is thus brought by a woman (I: 30). Temujin suborns the sable, and presents it to his father’s anda, the Ong Khan, leader of the powerful Kereit tribe, who is so pleased with the gift that he breaks into poetry and promises to restore Temujin’s people to him (I: 30).Footnote ¹³⁰

Later, when Borte is abducted by the Merkit in revenge for Yisuge’s earlier abduction of Hoelun, the Ong Khan proves indispensable, throwing his forces behind Temujin and Jamuqa, Temujin’s anda, to restore Borte and the other abducted women of Temujin’s family. This crucial military alliance – the first of many – lays the ground for Temujin’s acquisition of enough forces and men to consolidate the first step in his military campaigns.

The next step is again secured by Borte. After the conquest of the Merkit, Borte intervenes when Temujin asks his mother for advice as to whether he and his men should remain with Jamuqa’s forces, with whom they have been traveling for a year and a half. “Before Mother Hoelun could utter a sound, Lady Borte” interjects to argue for leaving at once, and traveling by night (I: 46).

“They all approved of the words of Lady Borte,” and Temujin and his men set off on their own (I: 46). This decisive break will bring challenges and setbacks, but it is also essential for Temujin’s emergence from under the shadow of Jamuqa, to become a leader in his own right, able to command the obedience of troops, and even to recruit those of Jamuqa’s men who decide to follow him. More men arrive, and Temujin is made khan – becoming, now, Genghis Khan.Footnote ¹³¹

As the third chapter of the Reference De RachewiltzSecret History concludes, students will have amply witnessed the decisive roles played by Mongol women, and will be less surprised to see, in other texts about the Mongols, women acting as rulers, regents, governors, ambassadors, and advisors in the Mongol Empire.

In the Franciscan John of Plano Carpini’s Hystoria Mongalorum, students see that John, the papal ambassador from the Latin West, gains access to the Great Khan Guyuk, Genghis’ grandson, only after he has first met with Guyuk’s mother, Toreghana Khatun, and has been checked out by this matriarch, a wily Naiman empress-dowager who herself ruled as Great Khatun for five years after her husband’s death, and before her son’s ascension (Race 298–299).

John also reports how powerful Sorghagtani Beki (“Sorocan”) was – the Kereit wife of Genghis’ youngest son Tolui, and mother of the Great Khans Mongke, and Kublai, and the Ilkhan Hulegu (Race 298, 387).

Later, when Louis IX of France sends the Dominican, Andrew of Longjumeau, to Guyuk with letters and lavish gifts, Andrew finds Guyuk deceased, and his widow, Oghul Gamish, ruling in his place. It is therefore a woman – Jean de Joinville in his Histoire de Saint Louis mistakes her for a man – who takes the French king’s gifts for tribute, and haughtily orders Louis to keep paying tribute (Race 299).

The famous pragmatism of the Mongols, which refuses to waste the talents of half the population, is thus amply attested in the first three chapters of the History. But our final text, Polo-Rustichello’s, will offer up the most memorable Mongol woman of all, a woman whose power did not derive from being anyone’s wife or mother: the extraordinary Khutulun.

Teaching Marco Polo’s/Rustichello of Pisa’s Description of the World

Le Divisement du Monde, or The Description of the World, a late-thirteenth-century composition by a Venetian merchant and an Arthurian romancer, is so richly capacious a text, and so famous, that the name Marco Polo is now suborned by restaurants, carpet vendors, ships, and spacecraft, as a touchstone for the exotic, travel, and the East. The text is a fine companion to teach alongside the Secret History, since it helps students see what happens to the Mongol Empire, forged in the early thirteenth century by Genghis Khan, once China is incorporated into the Empire by Genghis’ grandson, Kublai.

Since I’ve written extensively on this text, in chapter 6 of Reference HengInvention of Race – especially on race, mercantile capitalism, gender/sexuality, and how a European mercantile gaze itemizes a multifarious world and its people, places, and things into inventories for exchange and profit – I only want to focus here on two themes that integrate the text into my syllabus.Footnote ¹³²

First, we see that like Abu Zayd, Polo-Rustichello has no difficulty whatsoever accepting the humanity of foreign others when trade and profit are among the benefits of encounter. Indeed, the text’s wide-eyed reverence for Yuan China and its Great Khan, Kublai, is boundless: China is the greatest civilization on earth, its emperor the most powerful ruler by any measure (113, 124, passim). The capital city, Beijing (“Khanbalik”), daily sees a thousand cartloads of silk; the port-city of Hangzhou (“Kinsai”) has tax revenues so vast as to be nearly incalculable, though the text gamely calculates these at “14,700,000 gold pieces” (130, 229).

China’s cities are magnificent, and students may enjoy comparing them with Vijayanagar and Cairo. Like Vijayanagar, Beijing has professional sex workers, 20,000 of them, and quarters for merchants, grouped by countries of origin (129–130). Hangzhou (which also has beautifully dressed and perfumed ladies-of-the-night) is one of the world’s great wonders: surrounded by water, like Venice, but with 12,000 bridges, 3,000 public baths, and 1,600,000 houses; humming with multitudinous entertainments and goods, and evincing such massive prosperity, it seems the greatest city of the thirteenth-century world (215–216, 214–229).

A global-facing, cosmopolitan China, of course, sits on a bedrock of precocious modernity. China has paper money as legal tender: a currency that’s a marvel of efficiency, ensuring standardization and ease of conveyance, being neither heavy nor cumbersome like metal money, and guaranteed by a central authority and universally accepted throughout Pax Mongolica (147–149).

Paper money ushers in a vision of a world where fiscal exchange, in the form of a lightweight, uniform currency, is standardized, regulated, and universalized: a vision of modernity in a premodern era. The success of paper – a medium with no intrinsic value, but only symbolic and exchange value – depends on a willingness to accept currency as an abstraction: a first step toward the even more abstract forms of currency in circulation today, now vanishing into bitcoin, cash apps, and instant transfers.

Like Abu Zayd’s Tang China, Polo-Rustichello’s Yuan China also has a disaster relief and welfare system. Kublai commutes annual taxes for those with agricultural or husbandry losses, and furnishes the afflicted with replacement stock; he, too, maintains silos of grain, hedged against famine and inflation, releasing grain at cut-rate prices as needed (155, 157–158).

The Yuan state, like the Tang, feeds and sustains the poor, sets up schools for boys, and has an impressive system of registering births that ensures efficient surveillance for taxation and governmental purposes (157–158, Race 404 n.131, 227).

The postal system is a marvel, with trunk roads webbing the empire, interlinking post-stations, horses, and lodgings for those carrying communications, all routinized and systematized into engineered dependability (150–155). Trees are even planted by highways for the comfort and convenience of messengers and merchants (155–156).

While Mongol-ruled China benefits from, perhaps improving on, infrastructure and institutional systems already in place in Tang China centuries before, Mongol modernity is nonetheless memorably differentiated, and uniquely exemplified by an extraordinary woman: the historical personage known as Khutulun or Aiuyurug, among her historically attested names (spelled Aiyaruk in the Penguin translation).

In sharp opposition to all the women depicted in Polo-Rustichello, and, indeed, all the women depicted in our global texts – Sundiata, the Vinland Sagas, the Malay Annals, the Secret History, among others – Khutulun is never seen in the role of mother, wife, or sister. Her accomplishments are not the female heroisms traditionally attributed to mothers, wives, and sisters, which praise women for their support of men.

Instead, Khutulun, the daughter of Kaidu, the Khan of the Chagatai Khanate, is a fearless warrior: undefeated in combat, and so strong none could vanquish her (317). She even excels in wrestling – a favorite competitive sport of Mongols, in which death might be the outcome if you lose, as attested in the Secret History.

When we meet her, Khutulun is wholly in control of her sexuality and her life. Apparently excelling in psychological relations, she has successfully wrested an agreement from her father, the ruler of Central Asia, that it would be she, not he, who would decide the conditions under which she might consider marrying. Those conditions are deceptively simple: She will not marry anyone who cannot defeat her in hand-to-hand combat. To attempt to defeat her, a contestant must stake 100 horses as his bet.

Since she has amassed 10,000 horses when we meet her, we find that not only does the woman excel at this favorite masculine sport – having already beaten a hundred men – but she has become wealthy from her success. An unvanquished warrior and wrestler, this princess is apparently an economic agent par excellence, in a text that admires economic resourcefulness and wealth.

Polo-Rustichello is clearly fascinated with this woman, who so spectacularly fails to conform to gender expectations, yet is seemingly not punished for her deviance from gender norms. Thus confounded, the text describes one final attempt at getting her married, when a princely suitor – young, comely, strong, powerful, right in every way – brings with him a fine company, and 1,000 fine horses as his stake. Nobody had ever matched him in strength before, we learn (318).

Everyone in the court, it seems, excitedly roots for him, even Khutulun’s parents. Attuned as we are to narrative conventions laid down by mytho-literary characters like Atalanta or Brünhilde – virgins who are somehow tricked, and/or must succumb to a man who will take their virginity – we expect story conventions to incline toward a happy ending of female defeat, followed by grand marriage festivities.

But Khutulun handily defeats this paragon of male perfection, throwing him onto the palace floor and winning his 1,000 “very fine” horses. The text rubs it in a little: “such was his grief and shame … he lost no time in departing … bitterly mortified and ashamed that after finding no man who could stand against him he should be worsted by a woman” (318, 319). Our last glimpse of Khutulun shows her again in many battles, where, we learn, she had a habit of charging into enemy lines, and seizing and bringing back captives by force (319).

Polo-Rustichello omits this, but the historical Khutulun is believed to have eventually married, choosing her own husband freely, having two sons, and eventually turning down her father’s wish for her to become Khan after his death, because she preferred to continue leading the military, and supporting her brother Orus as successor instead (Race 404–405 n.132). Vilified by some chroniclers, who scurrilously hoot misogynist accusations at her, Polo-Rusticello shows this indomitable woman never being criticized in any way – not by those around her, and not by the text.Footnote ¹³³

Historians today tell us that warrior women were always part of Mongol armies (Reference WeatherfordWeatherford 121). A Dominican friar’s and an archbishop’s letters between 1234 and 1238 report that a Mongol princess led an army into Russian cities, according to terrified refugees; Thomas of Spalato, describing the invasion of Dalmatia and the siege of Split in 1242, tells us that “many women fought in the Mongol army and were braver and wilder than the men” (Reference WeatherfordWeatherford 121). Reference MayorAdrienne Mayor’s The Amazons, based on archeological data, also features Khutulun, and other steppe warrior women.

Ending the semester with the vision of Khutulun, last seen in the text still undefeated in battle, and the foremost champion of the army, someone who fearlessly captures enemies, as she disappears into history, is one way to attest to the surprises of premodernity and its global texts (319). While the vision of Khutulun may not answer to every wish we might have, as we encounter the global past, there will be students in your classroom who will find it satisfying enough.