Ibn Battuta - Lies - Extra History

[Music] hey extra strands welcome to lies the part of the show we admit our mistakes tell you about things that didn't fit in and with a series like this there are a lot of things that didn't fit in so thanks for being here I hope that you're doing well and staying safe and inside we're all doing ok here in Hong Kong this is our ninth week of social distancing though the restrictions aren't haven't been as severe as a lot of people in the US and UK are experiencing right now we're probably headed that way though our team is all ok so don't worry about us we're staying safe be a little bit patient it's a little harder to do our jobs I think as for many people now but we're doing ok and we hope you're safe thanks for watching our coronavirus video how do you have questions in that one so I'm just gonna really quickly answer three of them I have a Nepal flag because I went to Nepal twice on treks I love it there in Hong Kong yeah toilet paper comes in individual wraps like little rolls even if you buy a big bag because they get moldy it's so humid if you don't have that and yeah I I play Warhammer I start in about 1997 second edition 40k I'm long time Imperial Guard player I also write for black library if you didn't know that so yeah let's get into it a recommended reading a lot of you asked how can I read the travels you can't not without trying really really hard not gonna bridged a lot of Islamic texts are not available in English and this giant thousand-page book that needs to be fully translated from arabic is not super available it is available in parts but then also you have to worry about translation and how many notes it has because you actually need a lot of notes to understand what's going on because dude I wrote this for his world not ours right if you really want to invest the time and money hgr Gibbs the travel of it travels of it and Battuta of volumes 1 2 & 3 from the heck youlet Society Cambridge University Press it's started the translation started in 1956 they continue today the fourth volume is upcoming these things are gonna run you probably about seventy five US dollars each on the used book market they are quite expensive I've seen them for even one hundred and fifty dollars having said that I think it's actually best to read a condensed or shortened or summarized version where historian can kind of like talk you through what's happening and why and explain all the stuff with the Mongols converting to Islam because again even Battuta just like this is just his world like it's it's just him talking about his experience he doesn't give a lot of historical background on things and you can get quite lost easily particularly if you were not super familiar with Islam so what I read that I found really helpful was The Adventures of Evan Battuta a Muslim traveller in the 14th century by Rossi Dunn has a lot of the the travels in the context with liberal quotes from from the travels to supplement that you can use the website in battuto travels in Asia and Africa 1325 to 1350 for from four times medieval source book which is an amazing resource it does not it's not a full text but it has large notable sections quoted the travels of Aaron Battuta by eben Battuta by Tim McIntosh Smith also travels with a tangerine which is a travel book based on it he also did a great documentary called even Batu - the man who walked across the world which in 2007 2006-2007 he retraced parts of him and fears his journey for example he did not go to Baghdad in 2006-2007 probably a smart decision but there are large parts of the trip that he goes on and it's a it's a very cool documentary it's on YouTube so general stuff some of you asked where did it been Battuta actually like a lot of places he particularly loved Cairo called it the mother of cities he really left Anatolia and what is now Turkey the Maldives he was very complimentary of particularly how easy it was to get married and how cheap Towers were we have a new thing our patreon got restructured so one of the patron perks is that you can ask questions directly for lies we had one patron question this is from marina besides Eden Batu's travels what are other primary sources about the Islamic world in this time period that scholars consult is there any possibility that his travels may have been embellished and similar way to those Marco Polo there are a lot of sources from this period the problem is not all of them are translated to English the short answer is sometimes yes there are other sources sometimes no he covered a huge amount of the world so for the Delhi Sultanate we have the writings iodine Bharani who was a scholar who was very close to mom and to Glueck he was not necessarily in his government but he was nearby and he wrote a history of the the Delhi Sultanate in general but a lot of it focused on Mohammed took a look because he knew him personally for the kilwa Sultanate in the surreally coast we have chronicles but we also have the architectural archaeological evidence of their choral mosques and palaces and things like that which are very neat even Khaldoon who lived in tunis was a major source for the Black Death and in the Muslim world but there are other places like Mali and the warrior queen or Dora and some other small kingdoms where even Battuta is the only source we have so yeah it's hard to fact-check in on occasion where the travel is embellished oh yeah we'll talk about that later strong asks do we know how many times you is married and divorced 10 that we know of in the travels probably got married when he when he got back to San here ooh I forgot to count the kids there are a lot of kids there's the least three I can remember episode 1 we had a great correction which I'm so sorry about this one Muslims don't bow to the footprints of Abraham near the Kaaba when they're on the Hajj instead they pray and bow down to the God of Abraham near the Kaaba so yes this is a absolutely fair distinction I should have caught it that was said I went oh we didn't actually we didn't put that in there did we and I looked yep we did I missed it sorry down the Nile versus up the Nile we obviously meant down as far as the map not you know denial up the Nile is down because of the flow and down the Nile is north on our maps Mecca is too far south our maps are an abstraction if we had absolutely geographically accurate maps the artists would spend their whole time just doing like two or three maps when they have to do a whole episode so really we make a map that is good enough to convey the information that we're trying to convey Atlantic trade in the 14th century yeah there is an Atlantic trade going down to Africa and up to the Atlantic coast of Europe obviously we're not talking about the transoceanic trade at this point the saying seek knowledge even unto China this is a really interesting one because it is frequently attributed to the Prophet Muhammad but my research led me to believe or at least to find that there's a large belief that this is a misattribution that Muhammad never said this there's not miss writings so why just didn't want to get in the middle of that frankly because like I did not focus on studying Islam when I did my religion degree I you know know from research to a certain extent about Islam but I'm not a specialist in any way and I'm not a member of the religion that felt like a conversation that I I didn't want to interpose myself in the middle of like I'm not a good or bad arbiter for that so I just did not attribute it and let people think what they would but there's debate about it whether he actually said it or this is the misattribution episode - no one pointed out anything in this episode which is so rare but I'm just going to point something out myself which is when you see even between our getting all these riches from traveling around and a lot of them are like hey you traveled a long way to get here here's something to cover your expenses right it's it's part of the ha holiday culture and you understand why when he got to Mali especially after that long expensive arduous journey and he gets given like a bunch of yogurt he's like what is going on with this place this is terrible because like I don't I how am I supposed to even get myself a place to live here if you're not giving me something to cover my expenses so it's a little more understandable why he he feels that the Empire of Mali is quite rude to him episode 3 patron question Alex asked why did the Bell scare even Battuta so in Evin Battuta the man who walked across the world there is a section explaining that there was a medieval Muslim belief that the sound of bells drove away angels and it was considered like almost satanic which is very interesting right I thought that was very cool however there was something about it that didn't quite ring true to me unintentional pun sorry so I checked it out with a couple of my own friends and family members and they were basically like like we've never heard of this maybe that was a localized belief in North Africa or this is just something I was thought of in the Middle Ages that is not around anymore they'd never heard of it I couldn't really come up with anything on it so I didn't go that in depth to it but yeah he was religiously terrified by these bells to the point where he runs to the top of one of the towers in the mosque and starts chanting the call to prayer to counteract it and a bunch of his friends from the mosque like to run up and grab him and literally drag him down the stairs because they're like you're gonna cause a sectarian incident like people are gonna get mad and storm the mosque so yeah like but apparently he thought bells were absolutely terrifying I didn't even but who'd have a daughter in 8 months on his way to India no the journey took 8 months and he had his daughter it's quite a sad story actually so one of his concubines has this daughter and even battuto like kind of considers him or her his lucky charm she comes and everything seems to get better on the expedition for a while and they actually make get to India and they end this arduous journey and then she passes away like two months after they get to India and you can sense how sad he is about this and actually originally it was it was in the script but I was just like uh-huh okay it kind of distracts from what was going on there so I pulled it out amazing stuff from Indian viewers about Mohammed took a look apparently there's a famous book about him called the wisest fool which is an amazing title that perfectly fits also took look in India today it's still an insult it's particularly you would say a government action as is to look or is it to look in that it's insane or stupid and just doesn't make sense I think Mohammed took a look is fascinating because he is in many way it's like a very forward-looking interesting almost kind of enlightened figure on one hand Oh like all these ideas like coins that are backed by gold and I mean paper currency is already going on in China right there's already even a precedent moving his capital further south so that it's not as vulnerable to invasions from the north he has Mongols on his northern border right who invade very early in his reign and because he wants to govern and rule southern India like moving his capital a little bit south might help with that the problem is he wants all this stuff to happen tomorrow like he gets the idea and he wants to do the idea immediately no matter what and either of those things probably could have worked if he had used his entire reign to do maybe like one or two of those projects but instead he just like forces them immediately as quickly as possible and just totally ruins them and of like messes up really badly the coins were so easy to counterfeit that people were just doing it in their houses and the currency just totally totally crashed Chinese merchants right the China India trade is super important don't want them like what are they gonna do with those back in China right nope and there are varying accounts of whether he forced just his court or the end higher population of Delhi - just like march down the road to the new capital but either way it was really disruptive and basically just earned him a bunch of enemies and the whole project was a big failure probably should be used a little more carrot and less stick he used a lot of stick with a very big spearhead on the end of it but yeah he's just like sort of a fascinating guy with this almost I hate this term but he has kind of like a like a bit of a split personality all right there's the side of him that's very forward-thinking and interesting and a little bit like religiously tolerant in a way that kind of bothers his Muslim court and a bother even Battuta inviting Hindu and Jain you know mystics and holy men over to her we can have dinner with them and talk about religion and then there's this other side where he's just like a horrible tyrant right and his throat it was the execute FY it was the execution elephants that really made me feel like we have to do this we have to do this series like this thing about Mohammed to look like throwing people to elephants with swords on their tusks and if intruders whole like I've totally arrived this is great everything's gonna be awesome from here on out and then the execution elephant comes out and he's like oh no it was just such like a Curb Your Enthusiasm moment I was like this is this is great we have to do this series it's hilarious episode four even Battuta amphibious assault so yeah he fights in the sand fibia SACEUR where he goes ashore in a boat and they're making a beach landing in front of a fortress that's flinging like catapults are flinging boulders at them and he just doing this because he has essentially like ditched his mission to go to China after he loses all the gifts to the Emperor and decides that he's gonna find a new patron and in southern India and he fights in this battle and doesn't really distinguish himself but it very quickly becomes clear that like this Sultan sucks at war and is going to lose the war and yeah even pure just kinda like ghosts Hey it's like all right bye I'm gonna go to China all right Plan B abandoned to plan a I'm so sorry to say Queenie Dora is probably fictional this may be one of those sections that that Hibbins is a inserted there is an alternate explanation which is he was not in the Philippines though in the Philippines Queen odorous is considered this this very historical but also mythological figure is that there's a national hero there's this competing theory that where he actually was was Java and he's talking about Queen Katara who we mentioned in her mush pilot series maybe um or if he was drawing on things he had heard about her or it's an account from a different traveler that's been inserted so I don't know like so it's possible that we've already done an episode on her we might and we do an extra mythology episode about her even but Judah has the worst luck and the best luck yeah there's been some questions about this there's a bunch of questions about the Southeast Asian section of the books actually so there are some people who don't think that all these pirate attacks happened in these amazing swings of luck where he gets rich and then poor and then rich again I wanted to include them because they're not quite as disputed as for example going to Beijing so I put the man in else also there's just like fun like I just really enjoyed that section and I would have been sad to cut it episode 5 marina asked how this is a patron question how have modern historians obtained the death estimates for the Black Death shown in the episode so a lot of them are from a book called the black death in the Middle East which we'll talk about a little later but these are estimates by historians some of their sources I assume are from contemporary accounts others are apparently one thing--he the author did to get these numbers is to estimate take like the economic output before the plague and then after the plague and then figure out how much of a workforce loss would have would have created this so some things like losing X many a day like can be from the travels or like you've been killed or something like that but like a lot of the big numbers of 200,000 people like that's that's likely an estimate these things get our eat about even in Europe where how we have very good sources from it and translate an English people argue about death rates for the Black Death a lot it's very high did the Black Plague come from China well so it's generally thought to be Central Asia or East Asia so Central Asia kind of means more like the Afghanistan region and a lot of more modern accounts suggest Central Asia rather than East Asia so that it went to China along the Silk Road and you know went west kind of at the same time and then you know famously arriving in Venice via ships right what killed the ill Khan so we said plague because that's probably what actually happened but even Battuta like goes through this very convoluted story about how he was poisoned by one of his jealous wives so all right now like it was plague but it's a fun story know who else died of plague so you know when even Battuta goes to Gibraltar to fight in a battle to defend it from the Spanish and he gets there in like the battles over the reason the battle is over is that king alfonso xi of castile who was besieging gibraltar got the plague and died and basically like the camp just dissolved overnight like so the spanish like the king died and everyone left and apparently he had refused to retreat when the plague came up in camp he was like no we're gonna stay and then he gets plague and dies and all his captains are like good-bye how do we know what in the travels it really happened what is made up basically we have to triangulate between three things one of them is does it square with what we already know about the period and the area how solid are the details that have been matured is getting cuz sometimes he gets real hand-wavy and you're like mmm is that so this does sound like someone who's been there this sounds like somebody might read or heard about a place he sometimes says stuff that is clearly not true like that pearl divers in the Persian Gulf can hold their breath for an hour well you know getting pearls off the ocean floor which is something he likely heard rather than witnessed himself but then the other thing is like timelines so it's it's what we know whether he gets a hand wavy or it sounds like an account that came from somewhere else because even just say it looks like he basically just like lifted parts of other books to put the travels and whether the time lines make sense so like the timeline for getting to Beijing doesn't make sense and some of the details are like super wrong and a lot of it is very like hand wavy uh-huh so like probably never went to Beijing which is why we don't put it in the series same thing with him going deep into Russia which again is why it's not in the series those are the two biggest disputed journeys there are people who say he never got past the Maldives so that could be a thing like the whole journey of southern China is sometimes put into doubt but it's more consensus than like the Beijing journey that's kind of it coming up on extra history first of all wasn't that one off cool Thank You Ali thank you Jack and for taking sometimes kind of rough material and making a really good and great episode out of it if it made your interested readers of the Dead it's good it's it's very it's in the style of Evan fadhl on who's not always like the greatest writer persevere through the beginning and it's worth it lots of footnotes after that coming up next week is dividing the Middle East we'll be talking about the Young Turk revolution TE Lawrence and the Arab revolt King Faisal Gallipoli Winston Churchill its Gertrude Bell like it's kind of crazy how many people show up in this that I did not expect I probably learned more doing this series than anything else I've written for extra history and you see like the foundation of Saudi Arabia by Abdul Aziz even Saud and the British fighting a counterinsurgency in Iraq that sounds very familiar when we get into it the 1918 flu pandemic shows up because we couldn't avoid it sorry after that it's exploring the Pacific so we're doing Austronesian migration how these people from Taiwan managed to get all through the Pacific Islands we talk about traditional wayfinding techniques and European explorers like Magellan Tasman Cooke after that we're going back to Rome we have not voted on that series yet I'm looking at the topics that were suggested right now it's gonna be lots of fun I feel like we need to do a fun series with no epidemics in it I feel like we all kind of need a little escape in ISM and it had been a while since we've done a round topic so I figured it's about time you can join us on patreon we have a restructured patreon that gives out more rewards and also gets you extra mythology early in addition to extra history you can ask us questions and quarterly Q&A is you can talk to us on a discord server it's all sorts of really cool stuff we have a great community over there thank you for being a part of it oh and of course you can suggest topics and vote for topics so that's really neat we're not gonna do a little poll fact for this one because we're running a little dry on Walpole we've been doing Walpole fax for like five years now and we're starting to like kind of shred ground we've been before us so we're introducing a new segment we're gonna try it out called urban Battuta side-trip where i just kind of like go off on sort of a side thing that was really interesting but we couldn't really mention in the series and this is actually from a patron question from marina could you detail a little bit better why the population in Western Europe and the Middle East differed in their how they treated the plague religiously so the leading historian of plague in the Middle East is Michael W doles whose book the Black Death in the Middle East has a great bunch of great stuff on this it's an academic text it's very expensive to get ahold of it's like a hundred and fifty dollars but there are some articles that talk about some of its points free online and one of the points that talked one of the Articles talks about the religious and societal differences between the Middle East and Western Europe which which created these differences and one of these is that so early on in in the expansion of Islam when Muhammad was still alive there was an epidemic in the Middle East that struck his forces and as a result there are actual religious laws and and sort of religious doctrines surrounding how you should treat an epidemic disease and there are three main things the first is that the plague is into judgment it's a mercy from God and the dying of it is a form of martyrdom on par with dying in battle so it's not a bad thing like if you die from plague as long as you are good Muslim you can be assured that that you will you will live on in paradise right so there's not this like existential religious terror that takes hold like in Europe like what did I do wrong because I have the plague the second thing is that there's essentially like quarantine orders you're not supposed to enter a place that has a plague you are not supposed to leave a place that has plagued if you're already there now obviously this was not followed as we saw in episode 5 like people are running all over the place trying to escape this the mem looks Gibbons you to himself is like ping pinball in between cities being like oh but theoretically this is what you were supposed to do and that probably helped with the containment a little bit but also third since the plague comes directly from God and we don't necessarily just mean the black plague but any epidemic disease since it comes directly from God it's not a negative thing there's not a cannot a stigma of contagion associated with it that it is also a creation of God and that it's to be born you know and sometimes it's a trial but you know you you sort of bear it with humility so you have this difference with a society that is is just like kind of trying to endure and get through this whereas in media Europe which is very associated with sin and judgment and God and the devil directly intervening in human lives there is this explosion of you know the flatulent movement and particularly religious violence against both religious minorities like Muslims and Jews but also gravediggers and lepers like people kind of on the outskirts of society witch hunting apocalyptic predictions so it's yeah it's it's a very stark contrast and it's fascinating I highly recommend reading that article will link it all right thank you very much for joining us today we ended the series with have fun on your travels which nobody is having right now sorry we created these before coronavirus really became a huge thing across the world so what I'm gonna say is stay safe stay inside and we'll see you next week legendary thanks to Ahmed zo Turk Alicia bramble AC muse to Dominic Valenciana Gunnar Clovis Kyle Murgatroyd Elmo Owen chicawa and Orioles one [Music]

Channel: Extra Credits

Views: 107,889

Rating: 4.9043865 out of 5

Keywords: extra history, extra credits, extra credits history, rob rath, ibn battuta, history lesson, ibn battuta travels, homeschool history, matt krol, world history, ibn battuta extra history, extra history lies, extra credits lies, extra credits history lies

Id: G9HO75wcoUU

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Sat Apr 18 2020