Free The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century by Ross E. Dunn Page A

busy international port and the principal maritime outlet for the dense communities of Berber farmers who inhabited the highland valleys behind it.
    Bijaya was the first real city Ibn Battuta had the opportunity to explore since leaving Tlemcen. Nonetheless, he was determined to push on quickly, and this in spite of an attack of fever that left him badly weakened. Al-Zubaydi advised him to stay in Bijaya until he recovered, but the young man was adamant: “If God decrees my death, then my death shall be on the road, with my face set towards the land of the Hijaz.” Relenting before this high sentiment, al-Zubaydi offered to lend him an ass and a tent if he would agree to sell his own donkey and heavy baggage so that they might all travel at a quicker pace. Ibn Battuta agreed, thanked God for His beneficence, and prepared for the departure for Constantine, the next major city on the main pilgrimage route.
    Al-Zubaydi’s insistence on traveling fast and light had less to do with his young friend’s illness than with the dangers that lay on the road ahead. Ibn Battuta had had the good fortune to cross Morocco and the ’Abd al-Wadid lands during a period of relative peace. But the Eastern Maghrib in 1325 was in the midst of one of the recurring cycles of political and military crisis that characterized the Hafsid age. Sultan Abu Yahya Abu Bakr, who had acceded to the Hafsid throne in 1318, was yet striving to gain a reasonable measure of control over his domains in the face of a Pandora’s box of plots, betrayals, revolts, and invasions. On oneside were rival members of the Hafsid royal family, who from provincial bases in various parts of the country were organizing movements either to seize the capital city of Tunis or to set up petty kingdoms of their own. On the other side were the ’Abd al-Wadids, who repeatedly invaded Abu Bakr’s western territories and tried almost every year, though never successfully, to force the walls of Bijaya.
    As if these enemies were not enough, the sultan had to contend with the turbulent and unpredictable Arab warrior tribes who for more than two centuries had been the dominant political force over large areas of rural Ifriqiya. These nomads were descendants of the great wave of Arabic-speaking, camel-herding migrants, known collectively as the Banu Hilal, who had trekked from Egypt in the eleventh century and then gone on to penetrate the steppes and coastal lowlands of the Maghrib as far west as the Atlantic plains. If over the long run the relationship between these companies of herdsmen and the indigenous Berbers of the towns and villages was described far less by hostility than by mutual commercial and cultural dependence, the migrations were nonetheless a source of persistent trouble for North African rulers, who tried time and again to harness the military power of the Arabs to their own ends, only to find their erstwhile allies putting in with rebels and pretenders. In 1325 Arab bands were politically teamed up with at least two Hafsid rebels as well as with Abu Tashfin, the ’Abd al-Wadid. At the same time that Ibn Battuta was making his way across the Central Maghrib, an ’Abd al-Wadid army was laying siege to Constantine and had Sultan Abu Bakr himself bottled up inside the city. In the meantime, a Hafsid pretender and his Arab cohorts took advantage of the sultan’s helplessness to occupy Tunis. The kingdom was in a state of civil confusion, the roads were unsafe, and roving bands of Arab cavalry plagued the countryside.
    Ignoring the tumult, Ibn Battuta and his companions struck out from Bijaya across the Little Kabylie Mountains and arrived at Constantine without encountering trouble. By this time (it must have been August) the approaches to the city were clear. The ’Abd al-Wadid army had precipitously given up its siege some weeks earlier and returned to Tlemcen in failure, leaving Abu Bakr free to restore a degree of order in the region and lead his loyal forces back