The journey of Ibn Fadlan... Date or fiction?
Ahmed Ibn Fadlan, an Arab traveler and writer, became famous worldwide because of the film "The Thirteenth Warrior," where Antonio Banderas played him. Many viewers did not know that Ibn Fadlan was a real person. He traveled through Turkic lands, the Saqalba (Volga Bulgars), Khazar areas besides Viking regions. His journey produced the earliest known written record of those peoples, written nearly 500 years before any European description.
In 921 AD, the Abbasid Caliph Al-Muqtadir Billah sent Ibn Fadlan from Baghdad to the Volga Bulgars. King Almash bin Shilki had accepted Islam and asked the caliph to send a teacher, a mosque builder and a fortress builder to protect his people from the Khazars. Ibn Fadlan left with gifts and a letter from the caliph. He reached the Bulgar capital near the Volga River, but the money promised for the fortress never arrived.
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The route crossed hard country. Ibn Fadlan skirted Khazar lands by going through Bukhara, the Samanid capital. He stayed there for months waiting for extra money that never came. He then took a longer but safer road to Bulgaria and wrote down rare details about the people he met. Arabs at home paid little attention to his report - the land was far away and the climate severe. Centuries later, European scholars saw its worth, especially his account of Viking burial rites and other customs no one had written down before.
The manuscript stops before it tells how Ibn Fadlan got back to Baghdad. Some scholars think he stayed in Bulgaria. The last parts of the text look different - the style shifts and unverified stories appear - later writers likely added lines. Even so, the Letter of Ibn Fadlan is a key Islamic record of early Viking or Khazar life.
