Baltic – The Final Frontier

In the early 960s, an Andalusian slave merchant of possibly Sephardic or Muslim origin by the name Ibrāhīm Ibn Ya’qūb al-Turtushi made his way from his Cordovan caliphate to the northernmost edges of known Europe. On his journey he visited and was quite taken aback by the riches he saw in the city of Prague; he was also an early witness of the Polish Duke Mieszko's (Mashaqqah) fetus state just before the duke himself put it on the map in 965. Ibn Ya’qūb also heard something of the berserk-like Burus (Prussians) dwelling on the shores of the ‘Surrounding Sea’ (‘Oceanum’ in the Latin rendition) and that the Russians crossed this sea on ships coming from the east to attack them. To the west of the Prussians and north of Mieszko's country, also occupying the shores of the ‘Surrounding Sea’, lived the Velets (Waltabah) whose greatest city, perhaps identifiable as Jumne on the island of Wolin, was a mighty fortress with twelve gates.

The great value of Ibn Ya’qūb's sometimes surprisingly accurate and fascinating report – preserved in the eleventh-century Book of Highways and Kingdoms (Kitāb al-Masālik wa’l-Mamālik) by Abu Abdullah al-Bakrī – springs from the fact that its author stood outside the western Christian tradition of imagining the waters of the ‘Surrounding Sea’ as an impenetrable darkness crawling with monsters. To be sure, the merchant was confronted with a rudimentary form of such a fearsome phantasm of the North when he talked to no other than Otto the Great (called Hutu in Abu Abdullah's rendition), whom he met in Magdeburg. Yet for all his superficial fascination with rumours and myths of the distant Amazons which Otto supposedly fed him, what interested Ibn Ya’qūb the most were the customs and living conditions of his potential trade partners, that is, communities he actually encountered: peoples, towns, kingdoms – a very merchant-like point of view after all. He paid attention to their laws, settlements, types of association and rule, disposition towards others, etc. Ibn Ya’qūb, as it were, was making a discovery of the Baltic: the sea he saw, and subsequently the whole region, would be named after Adam of Bremen's proposition. It was a discovery in the sense that its maker, truly coming from the outside, acted beyond an ossified mind-set and took a look with fresh eyes.