Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces {What scholars failed to consider}

Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces

Steven Bernard Zwickel

December, 2018

I am not a historian. I teach technical communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

     One of the basic tenets of good technical writing that I drill into my students is the importance of knowing your purpose. “Don’t write,” I tell them, “until you know why you are writing. Readers should have no trouble determining the purpose of a document after reading just the first few sentences”.

     I was reading some articles related to my own family history when I first learned about the Radhanites. I was excited and I immediately arranged to borrow a copy of Rabbi Rabinowitz’ 1948 treatise, Jewish Merchant Adventurers, from the library. The Rabbi’s book discusses an 1100-year old Arabic text, called The Book of Roads and Provinces, that includes fifteen sentences describing Jewish merchants and the routes they followed. Rabinowitz argues that these about this small section on “Radhanites” should be taken seriously by modern-day historians.

     I was enthralled by the way Rabinowitz developed his thesis and I spent a lot of time and energy looking up some of the references to people and places that are now unknown or spelled quite differently than they were in the 1940s. The Book of Roads is mostly a series of lists of the towns and sites a traveler would encounter in the ’Abbasid Caliphate in the 800s with a few stories about local customs and myths. As one of the earliest scholars to translate the work said, it is “dry and monotonous.”

     During my second reading of Jewish Merchant Adventurers I was brought up short by the realization that I could not tell why The Book of Roads and Provinces was written. Rabinowitz parsed and dissected the text with minute precision, but never explained why the author had written the book. I tried some other sources—some 60 or so historians have written about the Book of Roads—and could not find a single one that defined the purpose of the book. Moreover, none of the historians who had written about the Book of Roads had an explanation for the presence of the section on the Radhanites (the only known use of the term in the early Middle Ages). Hard to believe, but it appears no one, in 1100 years, has questioned the author’s purpose in writing the Book of Roads.

     In this paper, Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces, I set out to answer to two questions: Why was the Book of Roads written and why was the section on Radhanites included?

About the Unanswered Questions

In 1948, the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregation of Johannesburg, South Africa, Louis Isaac Rabinowitz (1906–1984), wrote Jewish Merchant Adventurers: A Study of the Radhanites. Rabinowitz’ book was written to encourage other historians to reconsider the role played by Jewish merchants—called Radhanites—in international commerce in the centuries before the Crusades, based on a small section of a document called The Book of Roads and Provinces written around 847 CE by a Moslem bureaucrat living in what is now Iran.

       The Book of Roads and Provinces is a dull, disorganized discourse full of place names that are no longer used and distracting asides about events that may or may not be true. 

       In the latter part of The Book of Roads and Provinces the author inserted a separate section—just fifteen sentences—on the Jewish merchants and the four routes they took from Western Europe to China.

       In his book, Rabinowitz argued that the section on the Radhanites ought to be taken seriously and he offered evidence to support that idea. The first part of Jewish Merchant Adventurer describes the many Jewish communities along the routes, which would have made safe travel possible. Rabinowitz examines the viability of each of the four routes and concludes with a discussion of the goods the merchants carried and accounts written by contemporary travelers.

       What neither Rabinowitz (nor do any of the other historians who have written about the book) does not explain is why he thinks the Book of Roads and Provinces was written nor does he examine why it contains a section on the Radhanites. I will try to answer these questions by exploring the background of the author, ibn Khordadbeh, the history of the Book of Roads and Provinces, and how the section on Radhanite Jewish merchants has been studied by many distinguished historians. {His full name was Abu'l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh (820/825 –913) See <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Khordadbeh> and <https://iranicaonline.org/articles/ebn-kordadbeh>}

Unanswered Questions about Book of Roads and Provinces

This is the story of an 1100-year-old book, written by an unusual man named Ibn Khordadbeh, that contains an extraordinary section. Although it was known to Arabic writers for several centuries, the Book of Roads and Provinces was “lost” for hundreds of years and, when it was re-discovered and translated from the Arabic, it was attributed to the wrong author. When historians finally determined who the author was, they dismissed it as “dry and monotonous.”       It wasn’t until the 1840s that European historians began reading and analyzing the text.

       Most of the book consists of lists of towns and geographical features a traveler would pass when going from city to city, but one section is quite different. In fifteen sentences, Ibn Khordadbeh describes a group of Jewish merchants he calls Radhanites, who traveled from western Europe east to India and China and back. 

       It explains three routes the merchants took and the goods they carried to market. A brief paragraph follows, describing another group of traders, the Rus or Slavs, then there are four more sentences describing a fourth trade route from Europe across North Africa to the Silk Road in Asia.

       This is the only known reference to Radhanites and it caused quite a stir among 19^th Century historians, who believed it filled in a relatively unknown portion of Jewish history and explained part of early medieval economics. Books were written about the significance of Jews traveling (and perhaps migrating) along the trade routes to settle in central Asia, India, and China. Many speculated about where these Radhanites originated; were they Europeans or Asians? Some experts dismissed the Radhanite story as a fiction—a legend Ibn Khordadbeh had come across with no real basis in truth. Others expended gallons of ink debating the origins of the term Radhanite and what it might signify. The Second World War and the destruction of millions of European Jews, gave scholars new impetus to examine the Radhanite story as a way of taking a longer view of the history of the Jews. 

       Historians and other writers continue to be interested in Ibn Khordadbeh’s book and the story of the Radhanite merchants, but in 1100 years no one has ever (to the best of my knowledge) tried to answer two questions: Why did Ibn Khordadbeh write the book? Why did he interrupt the text to include the section on the Radhanites?

       This is the story of the manuscript and how I think it came to be written.

The Manuscript of The Book of Roads

In 847, a public official named Ibn Khordadbeh (sometimes written Ibn Khordadbeg or Ibn Khordādh-beh) wrote a book in Arabic called Kitāb al Masālik w’al Mamālik (The Book of Roads and Provinces/Kingdoms). With it, Ibn Khordadbeh became the first person we know of to write a geography book in Arabic. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was apparently popular because second edition was published in 885.

       According to a 2016 article by Jan Romgard, Ibn Khordādh-beh’s original manuscript was lost and only three copies survive: 

1. One copy (dated May, 1232) was donated by Robert Huntington (1637-1701) to the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford in 1693. Huntington had served as Chaplain to the Levant Company, based in Aleppo, Syria, a position he held for 11 years. Huntington travelled all over the Near East and that’s how he acquired the manuscript. This copy is in the Bodleian Library in Middle Eastern Manuscripts & Rare Books: Bodleian Library’s Islamic manuscript collection.
2.  Another, undated copy, possibly compiled before the 12th century, is in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. <http://data.onb.ac.at/rec/AC16238356> This copy may be one that came from Leiden.
3. A third copy, from the 19th century, is in Paris. The one in Paris may be one copied by Adolf Neubauer and written in 1862 or a copy made in Istanbul for French historian and orientalist Charles Barbier de Meynard (1826–1908).

While he was studying at Oxford, French scholar Barbier de Meynard learned from the Turkish Ambassador to France that a copy of the book was kept in a mosque in Constantinople. Barbier de Meynard didn’t get to see it, but he did get some help from Ottoman Turkey in the form of a copy with a few corrections, and he published a French translation of the book.

       French scholar Barbier de Meynard described the copy he saw at Oxford in 1862 as an “in-8° volume of 64 folios, on tissue paper, with a large and spaced writing. A considerable gap is noticed towards the end.” 

       What is significant is the use of paper, rather than parchment or papyrus. According to the Silk Road Foundation, the Chinese closely guarded the secret of paper manufacture but at the Battle of Talas in 751, the Chinese T’ang army was defeated by the Ottoman Turks and Chinese soldiers and paper makers were taken prisoner and brought to Samarkand. There the Arabs learned paper making from the Chinese prisoners and later built a paper factory in Baghdad in 793. 

European Historians Discover the Book of Roads

Arab scholars knew about the Book of Roads, but Europeans only became aware of it when people like Robert Huntington (1637-1701) and Abbé Eusèbe Renaudot (1646–1720) started bringing Arabic manuscripts to Europe.
       Early attempts at translating and interpreting the text were not successful. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was mistaken for a different book on geography by Muḥammad Abū’l-Qāsim ib Haukal called A Book of Roads and Kingdoms.
       According to the entry under “Haukal” [Ḥawqal] in the National Encyclopædia: a dictionary of universal knowledge (1884):

“Manuscripts of Haukal’s work on geography are rarely met with even in the East. There is a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford, and another at Leyden. From the latter MS. Pieter Johannes Uylenbroeck has given an interesting account of the work in his “Iracæ Persicæ Descriptio: præmissa est Dissertatio de Ibn Haukali Ge0graphi codice LugdunoBatavo,” 4to., Lugd. Bat., 1822. 

 

“Sir William Ouseley published, from what he conceived to be a Persian translation of the Arabic of Haukal, a work entitled ‘The Oriental Geography of Ebn Haukal, a  traveller of the tenth century,’ London, 1800; and Baron Silvestre De Sacy gave a further account of this work in the ‘Magasin Encyclopédique,’ vol. vi., pp. 32-76, 151-186, 307-333. But Uylenbroeck has shown that the Persian treatise translated by Ouse ley cannot be regarded as either a translation or an abridgment of the Arabic of Haukal. He considers it probable that the Persian work was one of those which Haukal made use of in compiling his Geo graphy, and that it was written by Ibn Khordadbeh.”

The chaos and collapse of traditional institutions that began in the 400s left students of history with few documents related to the 400 years of the so-called Dark Ages. Many documents from that period were destroyed by raiding Vikings, Mongols, and other raiders. Some legal and religious documents survived, but European historians struggled, and still struggle, to find a meaningful parchment trail that describes what was going on during those years. 
       From the 700s on, members of the rapidly expanding Moslem world were eager to find, copy, and translate into Arabic whatever documents they encountered in the regions they conquered. Hundreds of years later, these documents made their way back to Europe, where they inspired, in great part, the Renaissance. Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was among those brought back to Europe by scholars eager to learn more about the Arab world.
       During the late 1700s, a combination of events lead to the Haskalah—the Jewish Enlightenment—and many Jews fled the poverty and oppression of smalltown life in eastern Europe, especially life under the anti-Semitic Russian Tsars. They headed west, to Germany in particular. For some, their new freedom led to opportunities in the great universities and an opportunity to share ideas with other intellectuals and to start looking at Jewish history in new ways.

1819  A group of German intellectuals, including Leopold Zunz (1794-1886), poet Heinrich Heine, Joel Abraham List, Isaac Marcus Jost, and Eduard Gans, founded the Verein für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews) in Berlin. They, and other non-Jewish Europeans, began a serious academic investigation of Jewish literature, hymnology and ritual. These European historians (not all of them Jewish) studied Jewish history as part of a larger world history, including relationships between the Jews, Christians, and Moslems. They were eager for any information they could find that could help them understand Jewish life during the Middle Ages. 

1838 Aloys Sprenger (1813-1893), an Austrian “orientalist”—an old term for a person from Europe or America who studied Asian culture, history, language, society—came across The Book of Roads and Provinces while working on a translation of Book of Golden Meadows by philosopher, historian, and author Abul Hassan Ali al-Mas’ūdī (896-956) of Baghdad. 

According to another orientalist, Joseph Toussaint Reinaud, “al-Mas’ūdī was the leading geographer of his age, and traveled to Persia, India, Ceylon, North Africa, Spain, and parts of the Greek/Eastern Empire—throughout Europe and Asia.” 

Sprenger left England in 1843 for Calcutta, India, where he became Principal of Delhi  College. He didn’t publish what he’d found in Ibn  Khordadbeh’s book until 1844, in a paper called “Commerce of the Arabs” in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal. That article focused on what little was known about Ibn Khordadbeh {p.521} and translated the short portion on “The Route of Jewish traders, called Radhanites” with comments about the sale of slaves, the goods that the traders carried, and the ancient road from Persia to China. Sprenger wrote that he knew of only one copy of the Book of Roads.

1848 The Book of Roads and Provinces was “re-discovered” in the Bodleian Library by Joseph Toussaint Reinaud (1795–1867) a French orientalist. Reinaud wrote that “Ibn-Khordadbeh, who was so well placed to have precise notions, endeavored to make known the products of the taxes of each country, especially the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the distance of the principal places between them , the busiest roads.”

1865 French historian and orientalist Charles Adrien Casimir Barbier de Meynard (1826 – 1908) found the manuscript of The Book of Roads and Provinces. Barbier De Meynard is the one who called Ibn Khordadbeh’s writing “dry and monotonous”, nevertheless, he “proposed to take a copy of it, without, however, thinking of making it the subject of a particular study; but, pressed by time, I had to leave before having put my plan into execution.”

Barbier De Meynard eventually got his own copy of the manuscript with the help of Adolf Neubauer (1831 -1907), sub-librarian at the Bodleian Library and reader in Rabbinic Hebrew at Oxford University, whose job entailed cataloging Hebrew manuscripts in the Bodleian Library. [The catalog appeared in 1886 after 18 years of preparation.] Neubauer knew Arabic and made an exact copy of the Ibn Khordadbeh work for Barbier de Meynard, who published his French translation in 1865

1889 Michael Jan de Goeje (1836 – 1909) was a Dutch orientalist who found the manuscript in Leyden and published it as ibn Khordadbeh Abu’l Qasim 

Ubaid’Allah, al-Kitab al-Masalik w’al- Mamalik (Livre des Routes et des Royaumes, كلامملاو كلاسملا باتكلا) Fr. translation: Leyden. De Goeje’s work became the most widely circulated version of the book.

For the next few decades, historians of the Middle Ages relied upon ibn Khordadbeh’s work to demonstrate the role of Jewish merchants in international trade. They had very few documents related to Jews during this period and dissected the Rhadanite story, looking for any information it might yield.

      1919  Joseph Jacobs, (1854–1916), Australian-born English folklore scholar, included an English translation of the story of the Rhadanites in his book Jewish Contributions to Civilization: An Estimate that most modern scholars rely on. Jacobs’ book made a new generation of scholars aware of the Ibn Khordadbeh manuscript and inspired more interest in the Jewish merchants. 

      1948 Rabbi Louis Rabinowitz wrote a book about the Radhanites called Jewish Merchant  Adventurers, in which he attempted to show that the Ibn Khordadbeh account could be true because there were Jewish settlements all along the different routes described in the book. Rabinowitz was not a professional historian and reviewers criticized him for not having better library resources and found that his work contains many small errors—he misnames a few places and gets some dates wrong.

      1974 Moshe Gil (1921–2014), an eminent Israeli historian, revisited topic 25 years after Rabinowitz with help from Tel Aviv University grad student Elinoar Bareke. Gil included a long list of the academic writers who had examined the Rhadanite sections of the book in a 1974 article.

About the author, Ibn Khordadbeh

Abu’l-Qasim Ubaydallah ibn Abdallah ibn Khordadbeh (born between 820 and 830 and died about 912, according to Rabinowitz, p. 8) was stationed in the eastern province of Djibal, part of the Islamic ’Abbasid Caliphate. He was apparently living, in the city of Rayy, now a suburb of Tehran, Iran when he wrote The Book of Roads in 847.

      Ibn Khordadbeh’s official titles were Director of Posts Sahib-al-Barid and Director of Police (sometimes translated as Director of Intelligence), in other words, the Caliph’s personal spymaster. He was stationed on the “Khorasan highway connecting Baghdad with the frontier towns on the Syr Darya and the borders of China. It went from Baghdad to Holwan (the ancient Media) and went on from there to the heights of Hamadan.”

In Djibal, ibn Khordadbeh would have been about 430 miles from the ’Abbasid capital in Baghdad and 440 miles from Samarra, where, in 836 CE, the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mu’tasim moved the capital to the banks of the Tigris north of Baghdad. Samarra served as the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate from 836 to 892. {Jibāl = Djebel (Arabic: لابج)‎ was the Arab’s name for ancient Media, a region in western Iran. Jibal formed a separate province within the ’Abbasid Caliphate, with its capital usually at Rayy (now part of Tehran, Iran), until the ’Abbasids lost control in the early 10th century. Also called alDjabal.}

Ibn Khordadbeh must have sent his book to the caliph in Samarra, not in Baghdad. If Ibn Khordadbeh sent the only copy of the book to his patron and friend, the ’Abbasid Caliph al-Mutammid (ruled 869–885), in Baghdad, it would probably have been lost forever. In 1258, the Mongols sacked Baghdad, killed the inhabitants and destroyed everything they could find, including books and documents. Had the book been in Baghdad, it would have been destroyed.

Ibn Khordadbeh was more than a bureaucrat. He was extremely well read and wrote books with some authority on a wide variety of topics. He wrote several books on the “good life”(none of which survive)—in what we might consider “life-style” genre:

• Æsthetical Observations on the Art of Music {Kitāb adab al-samā’}
• On the Celebrated Genealogies of the Ancient Persians {Kitāb jumhurat ansāb al-Furs wa’ l-nawāfil} 
• On Geography {Kitāb al-masālik wā’ l-mamālik} The Book of Roads.
• On Wines {Kitāb al-tabikh} 
• On the Appearance of the Stationary Stars {Kitāb al-anwā’}
• On Courtiers and Royal Companionship {Kitāb al-nudamā’ wa’ l-julasā’} 
• On Playing and Amusement [listed by Aloys Sprenger, in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 1844 p.41]

The titles are intriguing and some of the books sound interesting, so one has to wonder why the author of books like these would bother writing a long, dry essay on the roads and provinces of the caliphate.

About The Book of Roads and Provinces

This is how Barbier de Meynard described the contents of Le livre des routes et des provinces:

§ I. Table of property taxes and royalties in kind, in the provinces subject 

to the immediate authority or suzerainty of the caliph.

§ II. Evaluation in parasanges (or miles) of all the roads that radiate from the heart to the extremities of the empire, followed by information, ordinarily too concise, on the history of each country, its productions, etc.

§ III. Abstract of travel relations, such as the description of the islands of the Indian archipelago, from the story of the sailors who, from Siraf and Oman, go to China, the interesting route of the Jewish merchants, and of other distant journeys. In addition, a selection of wonderful tales and legends, either from an apocryphal tradition or popular books, in the style of el-Djahedh.

§ IV. Description of mountains, rivers, lakes, etc. …We only have the beginning of this description, and I will add that the loss is not very unfortunate.

Here is an example from Book of Roads and Provinces [p.78-79]

Route From Merv to Chach and Turkish Country.

Kechmahen, 5 fars. - Deïoub (Kod, Divan), 7 fars. - Mandou (Kod Mansat), 6 fars. - Ahsa, 8 fars. - Bir-Omar “Omar Well” (Kod NehrOthman “Othman River”) 4 fars. - Amol, 6 fars. - Distance from Merv to Amol, 36 fars.

From Merv to the banks of the river Balkh (Oxus), 1 fars. We cross the river and we arrive at Karin (Kod, Ed Ferebr), 1 fars. - The fortress of Jaafar, in the desert, 6 fars. - Bykend, 6 fars. - Ribat “caravanserai of Bukhara,” 2 fars. - Masals (Kod Yasara), 1 fars. ½. - Chora ‘, stronghold, 4 fars. - Kourousghoun (Kod Kul), 6 fars. - Distance between Amol and Bukhara, 19 fars. The cities of the province of Bukhara are: Kerminyeh, Tavavis, Virdaneh, Bykend, the city of merchants, and Karin (Ferebr), which is not far from Bukhara. Between Bukhara and Samarkand, there are 37 fars. South of this province is the mountain range that extends to China.

As someone who taught communication skills to undergraduate engineering students, I understand that the two most important components of good technical writing are purpose and audience. For a technical document—a piece of non-fiction, intended to acquaint readers with important information—to function correctly, it must be written with a clear sense of purpose and in a way that makes the information accessible to the intended audience.

For all the scholarhip devoted to studying this one book, not a single historian asked or answered these questions, “Why was the Book of Roads written?” and “For whom was it written? No one bothered to analyze the purpose or the intended audience for this book. 

Thus, the first questions we need to answer: Why and for whom was The Book of Roads and Provinces written?

Purpose of, and Audience for, The Book of Roads and Provinces

Why would someone who had such a wide range of interests, whose other writings all related to the life of the caliphate aristocracy, write a dull, plotless book like The Book of Roads and Provinces?

Of what use is such a book? For whom was it written and why? Let’s look at some theories that may answer these questions.

From the way it is written, The Book of Roads is not an essay, but what we would today call a report. Ibn Khordadbeh is giving his superiors important information they can use. 

It is technical writing, which makes it quite different from the other books Ibn Khordadbeh wrote. It is possible that it was merely designed to be a guide to travelers, with amusing anecdotes about distant lands and strange customs, but there must be more to it than that. {The Book of Roads bears some similarity to a document called a periplus, which was developed by the Greeks and used by sailors for navigation before they had accurate charts. The periplus was a written list of seaports and landmarks along the coast, in the order in which a ship would sail past them and with approximate distances. The Romans also used another, similar document for overland travel called an itinerarium which listed stops along various roads. }

In Ibn Khordadbeh’s time, before there were accurate maps, Europeans and Arabs relied on geometry—from the work of Euclid (~325-265 BCE), of Alexandria. Sometime in the 1100s, Moslems concerned with facing Mecca when they prayed made use of the compass, invented in China. But the use of the compass for navigation and using equations and coordinates were a much later development. 

Because accurate maps and charts weren’t available, documents like The Book of Roads would have made it easier for travelers to find their ways. People in the 9th Century had access to some ancient maps, which were inaccurate by modern standards. Accurate maps didn’t come along until the 13th-16th Century, starting with nautical maps, called portolan charts. These were more precise and detailed than maps of the land. They showed sailors the shapes of coastlines, locations of harbors, and various navigational hazards (real and imaginary (like sea monsters). These marine charts formed the basis for more mathematical and scientific approaches in later periods.

Was it a Military Field Manual?

One possible reason for writing the report lies in the political situation of the time. The 840s was a period of great unrest, rebellions, and open warfare. The caliph and his generals needed to know where the roads were and the best ways for their armies to reach their destinations. In a chaotic era of war, rebellion, and turnovers of leadership, The Book of Roads could have been an essential field manual for the military, outlining exactly how the forces of the caliphate could get from one place to another. 

Three Caliphs in the 840s

The Book of Roads was useful to the Abbasid rulers because it came about in a period during which the Caliphate changed hands several times. The new caliphs needed information about geography of his realm.

At the beginning of the 840s, the caliph was al-Muʿtaṣim bi’llāh (796–842). From 842 to 847 the caliph was al-Wāthiq Bi’llāh(812–847). He was followed by caliph al-Mutawakkil ʿAlā ’llāh (847-861) who reigned in Samarra from 847 until 861. He was assassinated in 861 by his own Turkish guard (with the support of his son, al-Muntasir), which began a period of greater civil strife from 861 to 870 known as the “Anarchy at Samarra”. 

Clearly, the new caliphs needed all the help they could get to understand the geography of the Caliphate. The Book of Roads could have served that purpose.

Other Wars of the 840s

Throughout the 840s, the Moslem ’Abbasids were at war with the Christian Byzantine Empire. They fought over Italy (Brindisi, 841), Crete (843), Eastern Asia Minor (Mauropotamos, 844), Rome (846), Italy (Bari, 847), Sicily (Ragusa, 848), and at sea off Ostia, Italy (849).

At the same time, the caliph’s armies were busy fighting internal enemies. In 841, the caliph’s army had to suppress a rebellion against the ’Abbasids in Palestine, and, in 845, they put down a Bedouin rebellion in the Hejaz region in what is now western Saudi Arabia.

On the eastern border of the Caliphate there were also social and political upheavals. In 843, Chinese Emperor Wu-tong fought a war against the Uyghur Empire that controlled western China. The Uyghurs’ royal court was plagued by bloody infighting and the empire was under attack from their northern neighbors, the Kirghiz. An especially brutal winter in 839–840, combined with the attacks by the Kirghiz—who eventually drove the Uyghurs out—plus political instability and whatever damage a long drought had inflicted, caused the Uyghur empire to collapse in the 840s. 

Information about all these changes would have been important to the caliph for implementing political and military strategy.

The Book of Roads could have served several purposes

The Book of Roads was a precursor to new technology that was just emerging in the 9th century—the compass, astrolabe, and paper—which contributed to an increase in the development of accurate geography and to the creation of maps and charts that had long-term effects on world history. In a time before mapmaking, The Book of Roads would have been helpful for the caliph’s army commanders who needed efficient routes for moving their armies to the various war zones. For each of the new rulers of the ’Abbasid empire, the book provided valuable geography lessons that could inform policy, both domestic and foreign. 

My Conclusion: The Book of Roads was a report to HQ

Every author who has written about the Book of Roads has focused on how the manuscript serves as an example of medieval Arabic geography. Not a single one of the dozens of historians who mention the book has considered the question of why the book was written. {It has been suggested that The Book of Roads is an example of the Arabic fada’il literature. Fada'il  is Arabic for excellence or excellent quality. The fada'il literature describes wonders, individuals, groups, places and regions, often quoting the Qu’ran and attributing the excellence of these things to the glory of Allah. However, the fada'il literature dates to an era several centuries after the time of Ibn Khordadbeh. From Phillip I. Ackerman-Lieberman [Vanderbilt University Associate Professor of Jewish Studies and Law; Associate Professor of Classical and Mediterranean Studies; Associate Professor of Religious Studies; Affiliated Associate Professor of Islamic Studies and History], personal correspondence, January 6, 2019}

I think it should be clear now that Ibn Khordadbeh’s book was written as a report to his superiors in Samarra, most likely to be used to map out military campaigns by showing the most direct routes for the caliph’s armies. 

The Book of Roads has long passages describing the terrain and towns a traveler passes when going from city to city in the Caliphate, but it is interrupted by two sidebars, which follow sections on the towns between Egypt and Mecca, From Damascus to Mecca, and From Basrah to Yemen. {A sidebar is a very short article with additional or explanatory material, often set off in a box alongside a main article in a newspaper or magazine. In formal writing, the information in a sidebar would be in a footnote or an appendix.}

The sidebars interrupt the flow of the document and don’t seem to be connected to the matter that precedes or follows it. Thus, the second question: Why Ibn Khordadbeh stop in the middle of his travel book to write about the Radhanites?

The sidebars that interrupt the The Book of Roads and Provinces

The first sidebar consists of fifteen sentences that describe how Jewish merchants transported merchandise over different routes from the Christian west, east through the Moslem Caliphate, to India and China and back. 

Within the first sidebar is a digression describing the paths taken by Russian merchants. Then Ibn Khordadbeh describes two more trade routes. It is not clear whether the last six sentences apply to the Radhanites, the Russians, or both. 

NOTE: Ibn Khordadbeh’s names for places do not always correspond to modern-day cities, so I have added notes explaining where the sites are and other names by which they are known. {This translation from the Medieval Arabic is taken from Jacobs, Joseph Jewish Contributions to Civilization: an estimate. Jewish Publication Society of America, Philadelphia, 1919. Historians consider it to be the most accurate.}

Routes of the Jewish Merchants Called Radanites

1. These merchants speak Arabic, Persian, Roman (Greek), the language of the Franks, Andalusians, and Slavs. 
2. They journey from west to east, from east to west, partly on land, partly by sea.
3. They transport from the west eunuchs, female and male slaves, silk, castor, marten and other furs, and swords. 
4. They take ship in the land of the Franks, on the Western Sea, and steer for Farama (Pelusium) 
5. There they load their goods on the backs of camels and go by land to Kolzum (Suez) in five days’ journey over a distance of twenty-five parasangs. 
6. They embark in the East Sea (Red Sea), and sail from Kolzum to El-Jar (port of Medina) and Jeddah (port of Mecca); then they go to Sind, India, and China. 
7. On their return they carry back musk, aloes, camphor, cinnamon, and other products of the Eastern countries to Kolzum, and bring them to Farama, where they again embark on the Western Sea. 
8. Some make sail for Constantinople to sell their goods to the Romans; others go to the palace of the king of the Franks to place their goods.

• The Russians, who belong to the Slav race, make their way from the furthest regions of the Slav country to the shores of the Sea of Rum (the Mediterranean), selling beaver and fox pelts, as well as swords. The emperor (Greek) is content to take a tenth on their goods. Russian traders also descend the river of the Slavs (the Volga), cross the arm that passes through the city of Khazars (near Astrakhan), where the sovereign of the country takes a tenth on them; then they enter the sea of Djordjan (Caspian), and make their way to the point they have in view. This sea is 500 fars. of diameter. Sometimes the goods of the Russians are transported, by camel, from the city of Djordjan to Baghdad.

9. Sometimes these Jew merchants prefer to carry their goods from the land of the Franks in the Western Sea, making for Antioch (at the mouth of the Orontes); thence they go by land to Al-Jabia, where they arrive after three days’ march.

10. There they embark on the Euphrates for Bagdad, and then sail down the Tigris to al-Obolla. 
11. From al-Obolla they sail for Oman, Sind, Hind, and China. All this is connected one with another. 
12. These different journeys can also be made by land. The merchants that start from Spain or France go to Sous al-Akza (Morocco), and then to Tangiers, whence they march to Kairuwan and the capital of Egypt. 
13. Thence they go to al-Ramla, visit Damascus, al-Kufa, Baghdad, and Basrah, cross Ahwaz, Fars, Kirman, Sind, Hind, and arrive at China. 
14. Sometimes they likewise take the route behind Rome, and, passing through the country of the Slavs, arrive at Khamlij, the capital of the Khazars. 
15. They embark on the Jorjan Sea, arrive at Balkh, betake themselves from there across the Oxus, and continue their journey toward the Yourts of the Toghozghor, and from there to China.”

The manuscript continues, jumping to a completely different topic: 

“Access to the court of Chosroes was forbidden to foreigners who came from the following five countries: from Syria, through Hitt; of Hejaz and Yemen, by El-Odbayb; of fars. by Nabin; from the land of the Khazars and the land of the Allans, by Bab-el-Abwab (Derbend). A report of the arrivals was sent to him, and they were detained at the frontier, until the king had made a decision concerning them.

“The land was divided into four parts: 1^st, Europe, including Andalusia, the country of the Slavs, Greeks, and Franks; Tangier, as far as the Egyptian frontier; (2) Libya, including Egypt, the sea of Kolzum, Abyssinia, the Berbers and the countries beyond; (3) the southern sea, which bathes Tehamah, Yemen, Sind, India, and China; 4^th, Asia, including Armenia, Khoracan, the country of the Turks and Khazars. There is still a division of the globe different from that which precedes.”

Why did Ibn Khordadbeh interrupt the flow of the Book of Roads with two asides that seem unrelated to the rest of the text? 

These two sidebars caught the attention of the earliest Europeans who read the book and inspired scores of articles about these Jewish merchants—where did they come from? What does Radhanite mean? What do the four routes and descriptions of merchandise tell us about commerce in the Middle Ages? 

Not a single historian asked why the sidebars were included in the Book of Roads.

The Timeframe

When did the Radhanites begin their trips from the “Land of the Franks” to Asia and the Far East?

The Book of Roads was written in 848, just about 100 years after the Moslems consolidated the Caliphate by conquering the remains of the Persian empire. From 750 on, they were in control of a vast area from Spain and Morocco in the west, across all of North Africa to Egypt and Sinai, all of Arabia, and most of the rest of the Middle East. Ibn Khordadbeh was stationed in the northeastern corner of the Caliphate, near the present-day border of Iran and Afghanistan, and as close to Chinese-held territory as it was possible to be.

The overland journey described in lines 12 and 13 would not have been possible before 750, so that is the earliest date that the Radhanites could have been active. If it took them 10 years to establish the various routes, Ibn Khordadbeh would be writing about a process that had been going on for 90 years. Even in an era of bad roads and difficult communications, wouldn’t the story of the Radhanites be old news after 90 years?

Radhanite trade was described because it was new

I think that this section on the Jewish merchants was included in the Book of Roads because it was something new and different. The routes traveled by the Radhanites may have been many centuries old, but, in 848, Ibn Khordadbeh found something new to write about. What had changed was the situation of foreign merchants in China.

The Great Anti-Buddhist Persecution

Chinese Emperor Wuzong fought a costly war against the Uyghurs in 843 and the war bankrupted China. Wuzong decided that the Buddhist monastaries should be made to pay, so he abolished them and seized their assets. The persecution was also motivated by the perception that Buddhism was changing Chinese culture for the worse. To Wuzong, all foreign religions posed a threat to the traditional way of life. In 845, he ordered all foreign religions out of the country, including Buddhists, Christians, Jews, and others. 

No one knows exactly where the deportees went, and it is possible that some of those with Persian connections, like the Jews, may have moved west into the Caliphate. {Moslems in China were so few in number in 845 they were spared expulsion. When the ban was lifted, Moslem merchants began trading in China in large numbers. They were numerous enough by 879, to be among the thousands of foreigners slaughtered by the mob in what is called the “Canton massacre.”}

In 846, Wuzong died and his successor repealed the order of expulsion. Foreign merchants were permitted to return to China. Perhaps it was this re-opening of the east-west routes by the Jewish merchants that led Ibn Khordadbeh to include this sidebar in his book. He was reporting on a new development in world trade, something that could be of great importance to the economy of the Caliphate, and that is why he went to some length to explain it to his superiors.

Ibn Khordadbeh may have also been answering a question posed by the re-opening of the trade routes; namely, how did all this merchandise from the Christian world (with whom trade was supposedly prohibited) end up in the marketplaces of the Moslem world? Ibn Khordadbeh answered that question and added lists of the goods the merchants carried so his readers would understand what was going on. 

Collecting Tariffs

Information about what was being traded and how it reached markets in Europe and Asia would also have been helpful to officials interested in collecting the tariffs and other taxes. It is quite likely that experienced travelling merchants also knew how to smuggle goods into and out of the Caliphate without paying taxes on them. 

Recruiting Spies

The organization of the sidebar raises another intriguing possibility. In the first sentence, Ibn Khordadbeh enumerates the languages the Radhanites speak, followed by descriptions of the routes they travel from west to east. 

As the caliph’s chief of intelligence, it would be very useful to know about a group of people were nearby who were multilingual and accustomed to crossing borders. If Ibn Khordadbeh needed to recruit spies, the Radhanites could serve as a ready pool of qualified people. The theory that the Radhanites were spies is supported, in part by Jürgen Jacobi in two articles from the 1970s.

A more bizarre theory, that the Radhanite Jewish merchants invented the Yiddish language as a secret communication mode, was advanced in 2016 and quickly dismissed as without scientfic foundation.

My Conclusion

Dozens of historians explored the origin of the name Radhanite, analyzed where these Jewish merchants may have had their home base, and dissected the list of goods they carried and the different routes they took. 

For all of the intellectual analysis applied to the sidebar on the Radhanites over the past 200 years, not one writer tried to answer the question of why that information was included in the Book of Roads. 

What I have tried to show in this essay is that the section on the Radhanites was inserted to explain how trade between west and east restarted after the re-admittance of foreign merchants to China in 846. This was a significant change that affected all of Eurasia and marked the end of the Late Antiquity period and the beginning of the Medieval period.

The re-connection of east and west during Ibn Khordadbeh’s time set off a chain of events that continues to this day. The long-term importance of these changes can’t be ignored. The growing value of international trade was one reason for the Crusades (it also led to the devastating spread of the Black Death in the mid-1300s). The merchants who brought goods from Asia to Europe, especially spices, spurred the Age of Exploration.