Muslims on the Volga in the Viking Age: In the Footsteps of Ibn Fadlan (Library of Medieval Studies) (VOL. 10)

The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This pioneering interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data. In the year 922 a remarkable encounter took place on the wide banks of the Middle Volga. The eyewitness account of Ibn Fadlan, an emissary to the leader of the Bulgars from the far-distant caliphate in Baghdad, vividly describes his meeting with the forest steppe peoples of the region, whom the 'Abbasid envoy famously called 'the Great Unwashed'. He recounts a ship burial involving Viking funerary rites. This innovative interdisciplinary volume explores the wider cultural and political contexts behind the unique testimony of Ibn Fadlan. We have no other detailed written evidence for the Bulgars and Viking Rus, and prominent contributors here demonstrate why the report of this intrepid Arab traveller is quite unparalleled and singularly valuable in assessing novel cross-cultural contact during the period. The book reveals the full extent to which different peoples (Arabs, Byzantines, Turks, Bulgars and Vikings) were now intersecting, and how new structures of power and trade were emerging. It reflects too on how this Islamic diplomatic and religious mission might have foreshadowed the later 'clash of civilizations'. "The year 922 saw a series of remarkable face-to-face encounters in the steppes between Bukhara and the Middle Volga. Ibn Fadlan was an intrepid member of a diplomatic and religious mission from the distant caliphate in Baghdad to the ruler of the Volga Bulgars. His account gives a vivid eyewitness description of the peoples he came upon (whose appearance, rituals and filthy habits both fascinate and appal) and a famous depiction of a Viking Rus ship burial. It is unique testimony to burgeoning exchanges between several different cultures, and to the emergence of new political structures on the steppes. Yet the account survives only as part of a later composite work, raising questions of meaning and historical interpretation. This unprecedented interdisciplinary study of Ibn Fadlan's text and the world he surveyed draws on a variety of specialists to give readers both 'the bigger picture' of cultural and economic change in Eurasia, Byzantium and the Muslim world, and hard facts, in the form of archaeological and numismatic data."-- Provided by publisher