Ahmad ibn Fadlan: The first known Arab traveler who arrived in the country of the Rus and the Saqlaba.
In 921 CE, the Abbasid Caliph al-Muqtadir Billah ordered Ahmad ibn Fadlan to travel from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars. Their ruler, Almesh Ben Shilki, had just adopted Islam and asked for help to fight off Khazar control and to erect a mosque and a stronghold. The group arrived after twelve months on the road, but no cash reached the Bulgars because the treasury was empty and the court was split - Almesh felt cheated.
Ibn Fadlan kept a diary that tells what he saw among Turks, Khazars besides Saqalba. The part about the Rus, the Norse traders who camped along Russia's rivers, stands out. He watched a chieftain's body placed on a ship - the vessel set alight - his notes are the sole eye witness record of that cremation. Historians lean on this passage, yet they warn not to treat it as a rule for every Norse funeral, since copyists slipped errors into later versions.
Recommend
For its time, the diary reads like a field report. It lists wedding rites, gods, trade coins and the way people spoke. The detail wins praise, but some lines swell beyond fact - bones said to belong to giants, monsters and snakes as wide as trees. He also wrote that people ate from rhinoceros horn bowls - the bowls were more likely carved from mammoth tusk, a luxury good in the far north.
One paper copy of the diary turned up in Mashhad in 1924: 212 pages written in clear Naskh letters. The pages that should describe the Khazar court stop mid sentence. Lawmakers in Tatarstan chose May 12, the day Ibn Fadlan reached Bulgar, as a national date. They paid to repair old sites and built a museum to keep his name alive.
