Free The City: A Global History (Modern Library Chronicles Series Book 21) by Joel Kotkin Page A

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    In the ensuing centuries, the caliphate would shatter and Baghdad would lose its exclusive hold on political power. But still the city retained a notable intellectual productivity. Libraries and academies flourished, helped by the introduction of paper and the circulation of books, including translations of Western and Persian classics. Over time, Arab scholars developed thinner paper, making books more portable and easier to write. 22

     

CAIRO’S GOLDEN AGE
     
    The establishment of multiple Islamic capitals helped foster the creation of new centers in Spain, Persia, and especially Egypt. Founded in the tenth century, Cairo expanded over the ensuing three centuries from a courtly center of caliphal administration to a full-fledged cosmopolitan city. It became, as the historian Janet Abu-Lughod noted, “a metropolis inhabited by masters and masses alike.” 23
    By the time of ibn Battuta’s arrival, the city was under the rule of the Mamluks, a group of Turkish warrior-slaves who had seized it a century earlier. Grown to nearly five times its original walled area, Cairo had become an unsurpassed center of learning, with colleges, a library boasting more than 1.6 million books, and a major hospital. Its famous Citadel now towered over a sprawling giant of a city. 24
    Cairo controlled transcontinental markets as perhaps no city had done since the days of Rome. The Egyptian metropolis, ibn Battuta wrote, served as
    mistress of broad provinces and fruitful lands, boundless in the profusions of its peoples, peerless in its beauty and splendor, she is the crossroads of travelers, the sojourn of the weak and powerful. 25
    The Qasaba of Cairo, with its hundreds of stores, its upper stories home to some 360 apartments, and a permanent population of roughly four thousand, formed the greatest of these bazaars. One contemporary Egyptian writer noted the astonishing “abundance and diversity of goods” and a deafening hubbub punctuated by “the cries of porters carrying merchandise and delivering it to river barges.” 26
    The Qasaba served as a critical terminus for Arab merchants who now dominated the great trade routes linking Africa, China, and India with the Mediterranean world. Porcelain, textiles, spices, and slaves flowed into ports such as Alexandria and down to Cairo. Many of the luxury items most coveted in Italy and the rest of Europe filtered through traders—Muslim, Jewish, or Christian—operating out of the city on the Nile.
    In a manner seen under Sargon in ancient Mesopotamia and, later, Rome, this commercial vitality rested on a strong security regime. At a time when travel in Europe was exceedingly difficult and dangerous, a visitor like ibn Battuta to fourteenth-century Egypt could travel in safety, through a thoroughly urbanized, interconnected world:
    There is no need for a traveler on the Nile to take any provisions with him, because whenever he wishes to descend on the bank he may do so, for ablutions, prayers, purchasing provisions, or any other purpose. There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo .... 27

     

FROM NORTH AFRICA TO THE BORDERS OF CHINA
     
    Islam’s rise also created the conditions for a widening archipelago of major trading centers dominated largely by Muslim merchants. 28 Never before had one faith, or urban system, held such a wide sway. Dar al-Islam provided a common set of rules, modes of behavior, and cultural norms across myriad cities. Islamic regimes, for example, instituted a special office, known as a wakil al-tujjar, to supply legal representation and lodging to foreign merchants. 29
    These institutions spread well beyond Islam’s traditional heartland. By the thirteenth century, over thirty independent Islamic trading states, including Mombasa and Mogadishu, arose along the East African coast. Islam also flourished in West African commercial centers such as Kano and Timbuktu, where slaves and gold attracted merchants from across Dar