How the Trans-Saharan Trade Routes Work
In the eighth century CE, after camels were introduced into North Africa, Muslim merchants of North Africa began to organize regular camel caravans across the western Sahara. North African merchants carried luxury goods from across the Islamic world and salt purchased from the desert salt mines to the great trading cities of the Sudan: Timbuktu, Gao, and Djenne. (They also carried Islamic theology and learning, but that’s another story.) They traded for gold and slaves, and to a lesser degree tropical products such as ostrich feathers, ivory and kola nuts. Both sides benefited from the trade. At times a North African merchant could sell his salt for an equivalent weight in gold. According to fourteenth century Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, by the twelfth century caravans as large as 12,000 camels crossed the desert each year.
It was a dangerous three-month journey along routes that were little more than a string of oases separated by long stretches of featureless desert. But how did it work?
Caravans were temporary associations of merchants who joined together to make the difficult journey under the leadership of a hired caravan leader using camels rented from the nomadic Bedouin who lived in the desert. They often included one thousand to five thousand camels and hundreds of people. Typically, a third of the camels carried food and water for the caravan as a whole.
The success of a caravan depended on the caravan leader, who was typically a desert Bedouin. Paid either in cash or in shares of the merchants’ profit, a caravan leader was responsible for navigating the route from water place to watering place, managing relationships with the desert population–who could quickly turn from service providers to marauders–and supervise the daily work of loading, unloading, and feeding the camels. He had a paid team of laborers, scouts, healers and occasionally a Muslim clergyman to provide services, all generally members of the same Bedouin tribe as the leader.
Oases were the critical element. They were resting places where the caravan could find food, water, and fresh camels–the medieval equivalent of the truck stop. Some of the larger oases held regular markets during the caravan season, which typically ran from October to March in order to avoid the worst heat. The failure of a caravan to reach an oasis could mean disaster not only to the caravan but to those who lived at the oasis and depended on the trans-Saharan trade for their survival.
ADDENDUM: I’ve received several request for more details on where the different trade routes ran. This is too complicated to deal with in the scope of this blog post. I recommend The Golden Trade of the Moors by E. W. Bovill as a good starting point.
The Book Thieves
Ceremonial book burnings and the theft of precious art works are well-known elements of Nazi Germany’s rampage through Europe. In The Book Thieves: The Nazi Looting of Europe’s Libraries and the Race to Return a Literary Inheritance, Swedish journalist Anders Rydell tells the less familiar story of how two Nazi agencies—the intelligence wing of the Schutzstaffel (SS) under Heinrich Himmler and the Reichsleiter Rosenberg Taskforce headed by Alfred Rosenberg –competed to plunder Europe’s libraries until the regime’s fall in 1945.
The Nazis’ motivation for the theft and dismemberment of libraries was different from that which inspired the looting of precious artworks from museums and private homes. The stolen books were intended to supply Nazi “research” libraries with the raw material for an intellectual war between Nazism and its enemies. Jewish libraries, public and private, were the primary targets, but the agencies also attacked libraries dedicated to Freemasonry, socialism and the occult. Plunder was followed by destruction. Collections were divided up between different research institutes and warehouses. Books that were not deemed valuable, whether for their rarity or for research, were often destroyed.
The Book Thieves is written in the form of a quest. Rydell travels across Europe, visiting the remains of plundered libraries and the institutions that still hold many of the stolen books. He talks to librarians who are engaged in the overwhelming task of identifying stolen books and their owners, those attempting to rebuild lost collections, and those who mourn the libraries that are lost without a trace. In the process, he tells the story of how the collections were built and the heroic attempts to protect them, creating a vivid and heartbreaking picture of lost communities and lost knowledge.
A version of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
City of Light, City of Poison
One of the advantages (or disadvantages depending on the day) of hanging out with writers and spending time on the internet fringes of the publishing industry* is that you have advance warning of books before they reach the bookstores. Sometimes the wait is torture.
Holly Tucker‘s latest book, City of Light, City of Poison: Murder, Magic and the First Police Chief of Paris, was worth the wait.
Tucker walks the tightrope between scholarship and storytelling with practiced bravado.
City of Light, City of Poison is as tightly structured as an Agatha Christie mystery. She opens with a letter from a dead man and the hint of a past mystery. She follows newly appointed police chief Nicolas de la Reynie step-by-step as his investigation of two brutal murders leads him to discover a deadly network of witches, poisoners, and blasphemers with connections perilously close to the king himself.*** (His investigation also causes him to invent a seventeenth century version of forensic science, including chemical–or at least alchemical–analysis of poisons.) She places his investigation inside the sometimes vicious politics of Versailles with a sure hand. The story had me in its grip from page one. In fact, I read it when I should have been reading books related to my work.****
In a fascinating epilogue, she draws aside the curtain and shares her process of research and writing with the reader, leaving no doubt about the rigor of her scholarship.
Tucker’s last book, Blood Work, was excellent. This book is in a different league altogether. With City of Light, City of Poison she enters the rare list of authors who write historical non-fiction that is truly as gripping as a novel.*****
*Some writers plunge neck deep into publishing news and gossip. To me that feels like plunging up to your neck in swampy water, with a strong possibility of leeches.** I prefer wading in at the edges of a clear mountain river. But I digress.
**If you’re picturing Hepburn and Bogart in The African Queen you’ve got the idea.
***I now have even more admiration for my colleagues at Shelf Awareness who review fiction. Avoiding spoilers while maintaining a sense of the story is hard work.
****I’m paying for it now, but it was worth it.
*****Erik Lawson, David McCullough, Barbara Tuchman, Simon Winchester–like that.