Trade and Travel: Markets and Caravanserais PDF

# Trade and Travel: Markets and Caravanserais ## Eleanor Sims Muslim civilization has always been mobile. Both the Arabs and the various non-Arab conquerors from Central Asia were originally nomadic and inherited a tradition of travel. Large armies were constantly on the move. Students and schol...

# Trade and Travel: Markets and Caravanserais ## Eleanor Sims Muslim civilization has always been mobile. Both the Arabs and the various non-Arab conquerors from Central Asia were originally nomadic and inherited a tradition of travel. Large armies were constantly on the move. Students and scholars undertook long journeys to sit at the feet of famous masters. The wealth of cities depended upon the transport of goods over vast distances. And the Faith of Islam imposed upon the Faithful the most powerful of all motives for travel, performance of the hajj, or pilgrimage. In the harsh conditions and inhospitable countryside of most Islamic countries, these two last classes of traveller - merchants and pilgrims - needed more frequent places of rest and shelter than the widely spaced towns and cities could provide. This led to the construction of caravanserais along all the main routes-places where men and their animals would be safe for the night, and where they could be sure of food and water. They were often prestige buildings, paid for by the ruler, the state or a rich patron. Most resplendent of a splendid class are the two Sultan Hans (han is Turkish for caravanserai) erected outside Konya by 'Alā ad-Din Kayqubäd in the early 13th century. That between Konya and Aksaray in Anatolia dates from 1229 and is the largest caravanserai on that road, where there are many. The elaborate decoration and the contrast between the deeply cut stonework and the plain ashlar are typical of Seljuq art at its most sophisticated. Yet the portal (opposite) with its pointed opening containing the muqarnas vault suggestively recalls the shape of a tent, the ancestral dwelling of the Seljuq tribes in their Central Asian homelands. (1) ## On the road Caravans were a form of mutual protection, like convoys of ships in wartime. It was therefore necessary that all the ancillary services-the caravanserais themselves, their urban equivalent, the khans, and the markets should be built on a correspondingly communal scale, and features such as watch-towers and marker posts could be developed to a degree without parallel in the West. Left: an 18th-century view showing members of an Ottoman baggage-train setting up tents for the night after the day's journey. Right: two Iranian towers built to direct travellers. The first, dating from the 11th or 12th century, stands completely alone in the deserts of south-east Iran, and seems to have served as a beacon, like a land-bound lighthouse. The second, at Dombi, had a similar purpose but is attached to one corner of a caravanserai dating from Mongol times. (2.5.6) The tent is a form of shelter found throughout Islamic history and is still used today in many areas. Even to the Ottoman Turks, who excelled in solid stone architecture, it remained a natural form of dwelling. The tents of the sultans are comparable to their palaces the Topkapi is, in a sense, an encampment of glorified tents. left: a miniature of 1582 showing Lala Mustafa Paşa campaigning in Georgia, with the ordinary troops' tents in foreground and background. Many of these men would have been nomads, a way of life that survives all over the Muslim world. Above: nomads" tents in the High Atlas, Morocco. The hay, too, still depends largely on tents to house the pilgrims. The camp at Arafat, near Mecca (right), is a veritable tent-city, with pilgrims from different countries living in demarcated areas of their own, like the quarters of an Islamic town. (3.4.7) ## Bridges Muslim roads often followed pre-Islamic routes, and Muslim bridge-building techniques are based on Roman or Sasaniany precedents. Primitive structures can be seen today in remote areas like Afghanistan (left) Among the most impressive are those of Seljuq Anatolia, where the Roman prototype is modified by raising and widening the central arch. Below: the stone bridge over the Köprüçay River, between Antalya, and Alanya in Turkey. Other functions tended to congregate near bridges; the building to the left is a caravanserai. When the bridge at Jaunpur (bottom) was built, between 1564 and 1574, pavilions were added for tea-houses, and in time it became the venue for a market. (8, 9, 10) A high point of Islamic bridge-building is reached in the famous Khwajű bridge at Isfahan, where functional and aesthetic considerations are effortlessly combined. The central roadway is flanked by arcaded galleries for walking or standing and chatting. When the water is low, people can also sit and picnic on the stepped cut-waters. (11) At Dezful, in Iran (right), the road ran across the top of a dam built on Sasanian stone foundations. Behind it an artificial lake fed irrigation channels. (12) ## Caravanserais Still in use after 250 years is the magnificent caravanserai of the madrasa of the Mader-i Shah in Isfahan. This engraving shows the courtyard in the middle of the 19th century: it has recently been modernized as the Shah "Abbas Hotel. The superb entrance portal of another Safavid caravanserai (right), at Chah-i Siyah, 1687, has the same monumental quality as the gate of the bazaar in the Maydan-i Shah. (13, 14) Abandoned and alone, the ruins of the Siahkuh caravanserai in Iran clearly display the standard plan and construction. The courtyard is entered by a single gate on the right. There are two rows of internal rooms, both covered by vaults, the outer one probably with an upper storey. Stables would have been in the round corner towers, not directly connected with the living rooms. (15) By the 19th century, caravanserais were often ill maintained but were still used. This scene, published in 1851, shows merchants resting and smoking after the day's journey. Stables are to the left. Light comes through a hole in the roof. On the racks behind are blankets and saddles, and in the foreground bales of merchandise. (16) Today caravanserais may be used as animal pens. Above: at Yunesi, Iran. Right: looking along one aisle of the great vaulted hall of the Sultan Han shown overleaf. (17,18) Between Kayseri and Sivas, in Anatolia, stands the second of 'Ala al-Din Kayqubād's two Royal Caravanserais, at Palas (left). Built between 1232 and 1236, it comprises a large open courtyard and a great covered hall opening from the side opposite the entrance. Here we are looking across the courtyard, with arcades on the right housing stables, towards the hall's splendidly decorated portal. Behind it rises the high central dome of the hall. The free-standing structure on the left was a mosque, raised on arches and reached by stairs. (19) Within the city the caravanserai is known as a khăn, and it required less fortification but more space for storage and commercial transactions. A 19th-century view of a han at > Güzel Hisar, in Anatolia (right), shows that it was a social centre as well. (21) The battered mud walls and cresting of the caravanserai near Tash Kurghan, in Afghanistan (below), contrast with the repeated niches on the exterior of that near Gaz, in Iran (below right), although their plans are essentially the same. (20,22) ## Khāns The urban caravanserai, or khan, is essentially a warehouse, often with stabling and shops as well. Few of them are as splendid as the best of the country ones, but they can be of considerable size and complexity. The khän Özdemür in Aleppo has a finely decorated portal on the street (left). The doors would have been closed at night. (23) Five storeys high, the great khân of Qänsüh al-Ghüri in Cairo marks a high tide of Mamlük prosperity. The two lower floors were for storage. The upper floors were apartments, arranged in vertical units and reached by separate inner staircases. (26) In North Africa the khin is called a funduq. but structure and purpose remain the same throughout Islam. Above: an example in Tripoli, its columns recalling Byzantine and Hafsid models. (24) Mustafa III endowed the 'Great New Khăn' (Büyük Yeni Han) in Istanbul in 1764 (left). It has the standard ground-floor arcade for storage, with living quarters above. It is interesting to see that even in its dilapidated state trade and light industry still find a place there today. (25) ## Markets A settled hierarchy governs the layout of Muslim markets, and is surprisingly constant from North Africa to India. Food-stuffs are generally sold in the open air, as in this example at Rissani, Morocco. (27) The cloth market: detail from a Mughal miniature of the 17th century. (28) The standard bazaar plan is a network of streets (ságs) covered with vaults and domes, often with higher domed or open areas at the crossing-points. In Central Asia, the market may be enclosed by a wall, as in Bukhara (below), where the wall was recently rebuilt. (29) The bazaar is one of the classic defining features of an Islamic town, the commercial 'spine' of the urban fabric linking mosques, hammams, khāns and schools, a city in miniature, consisting of dozens of streets, sometimes intersecting at right angles. Shops selling the same goods are always grouped together, so that there will be a spice bazaar, a leather bazaar, a metalwork bazaar. The plan of Aleppo market is reproduced and explained on p. 108. Where the main streets cross, the large spaces are either domed or open to the sky. One such crossing in Aleppo (right) is given elaborate mugarnas decoration. (31) Each shop occupies one compartment in the ság. This part of the carpet section is in the bazaar at Tripoli, Libya. Every available wall surface is used for displaying goods. (30) The vaulted streets are lit by apertures in the centre of each bay, creating a cool and well ventilated space that is ideal for hot climates. Essentially the same architectural form prevails over the whole Islamic world; a typical interior, such as that of the Aleppo bazaar (right), is roofed in a procession of domes. (32) Bazaar and bath Bazaar and mosque grew together, the twin poles of Islamic urban life, separate but in harmony. This remains true even at a local level, as in this small bazaar at Qazvin, Iran (above left). Above right books and spices for sale in the süp at Kashan. Grandest of all the Ottoman bazaars is that of Istanbul (below), at whose centre rise the two multi- domed sections of the bedesten, where the most precious goods were sold. (33, 34, 35) The bath (hammam) was an institution inherited by the Muslims from the Classical world. A 19th-century engraving of the 18th-century Çağaloğlu Hammām in Istanbul (above) shows the hot stone in the centre and the stone benches where bathers stretched out and steamed. Below left: the disrobing room of a Mughal bath, depicted in 1601, showing bathers undressing and preparing to enter the hot rooms. Below right: part of the baths of Ganj 'Ali Khan at Kerman, recently restored. (36, 37, 38) The bazaar of the silk merchants: one of David Roberts's evocative lithographs of Cairo in 1849. The bazaar has grown up in the space between the early 16th-century collegiate mosque (left) and tomb (right) of Sultan Qansüh al-Ghūrī. Many such bazaars in Cairo were located in streets and passages that could be closed at night by wooden doors and chains. Mamluk windows, placed at least two metres above the ground, enabled stalls to be pitched against them without difficulty. The wooden roof is substantial but is not a permanent structure, and the shopkeepers stand on a kind of dais some feet above the road. (39) ONE OF THE MORE underestimated characteristics of Muslim culture is the extraordinary mobility of its people, their matter-of-fact traversing of distances that even today daunt the traveller in the Middle East. Islam, however, was born in a land with many centuries' experience of trading on the land-routes between the Yemen and the Mediterranean; and the revelation of Islam was entrusted to a man from a trading family, who had himself been to Syria at least once by camel-caravan. By the middle of the 7th century the armies of Islam controlled territory from the Pyrenees to the marches of Central Asia, and these peripheral areas were kept within the dar al-Islām as much by the constant provisioning by caravan as by military garrisons and governors. Islam's secondary, mainly peaceful expansion along the coastal regions of India, South-East Asia and Africa also followed in the wake of routes opened by traders; and accessibility, whether for commercial or for military communication, was always to be a significant factor in the choice of sites for the many new cities founded by Islam. In addition to a long established commercial tradition, Islam imposed upon its followers the supreme reason to travel: the performance of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca and the other holy places in the Arabian Peninsula. The Qur'an commands the Muslim: 'Pilgrimage to the House is a duty to Allah for all who can make the journey' (Sūra iii, 97-8). Religious and commercial activities were by no means mutually exclusive, however: 'It shall be no offence for you to seek the bounty of your Lord by trading" (Sūra ii, 199). From early Islamic times, therefore, Muslims who made the hajj carried goods with them on their return from Mecca to defray the costs of travel. By the 9th century appeared the practice of visiting the places in lower Iraq where 'Alī, the fourth caliph, and his sons, Hasan and Husayn, had been martyred, while shrines of saints in other parts of the Islamic world increasingly attracted pilgrims in search of blessing, baraka. Thus it was, that for commercial, religious or educational reasons much of Islam was constantly on the road. Merchant, pilgrim and student alike needed protection from robbery and from weather, both in the cities and in the inhospitable deserts or semi-arid lands that comprise so much of the Muslim world. An assured source of water was needed for drinking, bathing and ritual ablution, as was a place in which to perform daily prayers. Ways of crossing were needed at rivers, while in less inhabited areas road-markers and watch-towers were necessary. In towns, the corresponding source of shelter, security and water and equally the mercantile focus of so many journeys was the market area, usually at the heart of the Muslim city. Markets were also manufacturing centres for goods of all kinds, especially for small and precious wares; although goods produced by offensive methods - tanned skins for example - were produced on the outskirts of towns. The financial basis providing for the amenities of the road, and also for the urban shelters, schools, baths and markets, was more broadly spread throughout the Islamic community than elsewhere in the medieval world, and as early as the 9th century private revenues were being used to erect facilities for pilgrims all over Arabia. Such funds were made available as a waqf, an inalienable gift of money, property or other valuable object, to be used only for the purpose specified in the deed of endowment and administered in perpetuity, according to religious law. As regards trade and travel in the Islamic world, a waqf could operate in two ways: funds maintained shelters, caravanserais, for travellers to stay gratis for a specified number of days and to receive food for themselves and their beasts during that period; or the caravanserai, the khān or the hammam could be turned into the revenue-producing instrument. Thus, both on the road and in cities, caravanserais and their urban equivalent, the khāns, provided facilities for the storage and sale of foods whose revenues in turn supported not only the markets but mosques, madrasas and convents in the city, and the caravanserais of the road. The sources contributing to our knowledge of Islam's architectural response to the needs of its travelling citizenry are several. The most obvious source would seem to be the buildings themselves, although caravanserais, khāns, baths (hammāms) and bridges survive unevenly distributed across the entire Islamic world and in widely varying states of preservation. A few caravanserais, like that built by an Ottoman grand vizier in Edirne, about 1560, are still in use as hotels today; some are empty monuments marking a trade or pilgrimage route, while others are in ruin and reveal little more than a stone or mud-brick ground-plan. Furthermore, the very nature of Islamic travel architecture, linked as it always was to geographical factors and to political policy, meant that many caravanserais and bridges were never intended as major architectural monuments but rather as facilities en route, more noticeable by their absence than by their presence. Indeed, caravanserais in certain parts of the Muslim world - in Egypt, Ifrikiyah and North Africa, in southern Iraq, in parts of Afghanistan - were never a major architectural expression and, even in the Arabian Peninsula, caravanserais of early date are known almost entirely from literary references. The Islamic caravanserai has often been likened to the American motel, where shelter, water, food and a place for one's vehicle are combined in one structure. An even better modern equivalent might be the petrol station, occurring at regular intervals - ubiquitous, unremarkable and unremarked - along the motor roads of the entire world. Markets, khāns and baths, on the other hand, are primary focal points of the urban landscape and tended to remain relatively fixed in location, but the original structures are hardly ever extant, owing to the ravages of war, fire and other natural disasters, and the upgrading of market facilities over the centuries, not to speak of the destruction wrought by modern town-planning. Literary sources of many kinds are, therefore, of signal importance to a study of Islamic trade and travel architecture. There exists a vast literature in Arabic and Persian and, at a later date, Turkish: the 'route-books', lists of roads, settlements and cities by which the extent of the Muslim world was calculated and its taxes computed; geographical writing, a genre that flourished from the 9th century onwards; local historians; references in belles-lettres; and the travellers who wrote so copiously about their journeys. Nāsir-i Khusraw, for example, visited Egypt in 1046, leaving an invaluable picture of Fatimid Cairo; Ibn Battuta left his native town of Fez in 1325 to traverse the length and breadth of the Islamic world and even beyond, to China, performing the hajj four times and each time approaching the holy cities by a different route. To such accounts may also be added, from the 13th century, the writings of Europeans travelling for religious, commercial, diplomatic, scientific or military reasons. ## Origins and characteristics of trade and travel architecture Islam inherited a world with a material apparatus of military and commercial routes and trading centres, all of which continued to function under Islam in essentially the same way as they had before these areas were brought within the där al-Islām. The institution of the safe road with protected stations along its length was established, as Herodotus writes, under the Achaemenid Great King Cyrus: > The whole idea is a Persian invention, and works like this... At intervals all along the road are recognized stations, with excellent inns, and the road is safe to travel by, as it never leaves inhabited country... the total number of stations, or posthouses, on the road from Sardis to Susa is 111. About the architecture of these inns, however, we have virtually no information, although they were probably built of beaten earth or mud-brick, materials that are highly perishable and now difficult to distinguish from the earth in which their remains have long been buried. We have equally sparse information about the network of roads by which, in the six centuries between Herodotus and the Romans, silk came overland from China through Sasanian Persia to the upper Euphrates where it was transhipped to Rome, or by which spices and perfumes travelled from India and the Yemen through the oases of western Arabia and thence to the caravan cities of Petra, Palmyra and Dura Europos for transfer to Rome - and, later, to Constantinople. From the 1st century AD, Rome responded to the necessity of defending its Syrian frontier, the limes arabicus, with a line of solid stone forts, doubtless providing one of the models for later Islamic caravanserais with their open courts, strong enclosure walls and large single portals. There are other prototypes, however, for a caravanserai such as the Seljuq Ribat-i Māhī, which resembles the castles in Soghdia in the middle centuries of the 1st millennium BC as much as it does the Roman frontier forts in the 3rd century AD. These Soghdian castles were probably descended from still more ancient communal dwellings in Central Asia and Iran, whose plans are also characterized by a rectangular outline surrounding an open space in the centre for animals to graze in, high walls with fortified corner towers and a single large gateway dominated by a watch-tower. This simple plan has remarkable longevity and can be seen not only in the 5th-century BC castle of ancient Khwarazm, but in almost any Islamic caravanserai; whether in the stone remains of Kunar-i Siyah in Iran; in the 13th-century Evdır Han in southern Anatolia; or in the grand Qājär complex of Aliabad, built north of Qum less than a century ago, in 1886. Nor can analogous structures from cultures further east of Islam be ignored, such as the stone-built Buddhist monasteries found along the trade routes leading westward from China through Central Asia. Like later Islamic caravanserais, they served travellers and merchants as well as pilgrims. A continuous line of Chinese military posts, small square forts, and watch-towers was in existence by late in the 2nd century BC to protect China's frontier on the west, just as the limes arabicus protected Rome's eastern frontier. Thus the institution of a line of shelters with water, erected at fixed intervals on routes throughout vast uninhabited areas, was long established in the Ancient World and was simply continued by Islam, though both the institution and the architectural form were shaped to Islam's specific needs. Much the same can be said of the origins of bridges. Those that rank as major architectural monuments clearly continued to use Roman engineering techniques and methods of construction, although their basic forms were filtered through Sasanian Iran, or subsidiary structures such as toll-gates, pavilions and caravanserais were grafted to them. Even boat bridges, pontoons lashed together over which roads were laid, such as were always used in Baghdad, derived from Roman usage, especially over the Euphrates in Syria. The origins of the minaret, in its guise as an aid to travellers, are far more various and complex, for not only is its pre-Islamic history harder to trace, but its function within Islam is by no means uniform. In central Islam, especially Syria, the bell-towers of Christian churches have long been considered the formal and functional prototypes of minarets; in specific cases in Iraq, Egypt and North Africa, older oriental forms have been suggested, such as the ziggurats of Mesopotamia or, more recently, the Sasanian fire-temple. Yet many minarets are quite strikingly different from any of these models: most conspicuously, the cylindrical Iranian brick minaret, and especially those of the Seljuq period with their tall slender tapering forms. The facts that many Seljuq minarets are free-standing and that some, with exceptional decoration, have been found in places where there was not, nor ever could have been, a mosque, suggest that their functions were not limited to the purely liturgical. Instead, minarets seem to have taken over the functions and certain aspects of the following forms: lighthouses (especially those of Classical Antiquity on the North African coastline running west from Alexandria, with its famed Pharos); watch- or signal-towers (such as those of the Roman limes arabicus or along the Chinese frontier with Central Asia); towers for fire signals, spoken of in Islamic Central Asia by Mahmūd of Kashghar, in the 11th century; and commemorative columns in India, known from at least the 3rd century BC. The important point here is that the Islamic minaret served as a beacon for travellers on the trade and pilgrimage routes. A great number of single minarets dating from the 11th and 12th centuries are known on the Khurasan Road, on the routes west of the central Iranian desert and between Kerman and the Isfahan region, such as that at the Masjid-i Malik in Kerman, and the minarets at Kirat and Golpayegan. Such minarets usually have interior staircases giving access not only to the balcony, where the muezzin would call the Faithful to prayer, but to the very top of the tower, where the beacon itself, probably a bituminous substance, could be lit. According to the historians and geographers of Islam, the market, along with the congregational mosque and, occasionally, the hammām, defined the very essence of the Islamic city. The Classical precedents for Islamic markets are obvious; but Soviet archaeologists have demonstrated that, because Central Asia as early as the Achaemenid period was probably as urbanized as the Mediterranean littoral, the market structures and practices in eastern towns in what are now the provinces of Soviet Central Asia are also of significance in the development of Islamic markets, although the exact sequence of influences is usually difficult to assess. Three specific kinds of structures contribute to the typical Islamic market: a network of covered streets, a securely gated and covered edifice in its midst, and khāns, the urban equivalent of the caravanserai. Any Muslim settlement with a market also had a number of hammāms, since Islamic law demanded complete immersion on certain occasions, and at least one bath - and very often more - was always found in the market district. It is important to realize that, while all towns of any pretension had a central market with covered streets, khāns, the secured structure and a hammām clustered around the congregational mosque, capital cities and larger towns were composed of many quarters, each containing the cardinal elements of a town - mosque, bazaar and hammām – on a small scale and without the specialized structures of the central market. Like the central market, these elements were often grouped at the crossing of roads, at the chahar-süq (literally 'four sides' or 'roads'), and this concept is expressed in the most common names for markets in Islamic countries: the Arabic suq, for the covered streets of the market, and, by extension, the market itself; the Persian chahar-süq, or chahar-sü, for the major intersections within the covered network of market streets; and the Turkish çarşı, the whole market complex. In the lands that had been part of the Classical world and its Byzantine successor, markets were usually located around the congregational mosque in precisely the same arrangement and serving the same functions as had the Classical agora with its surrounding public buildings and colonnaded market streets. A much paraphrased passage describes the hierarchy by which wares tended to be grouped around the congregational mosque. Purveyors of candles and incense were directly next to the mosque, in the company of booksellers, stationers, bookbinders and the vendors of other small leather goods. These were followed by the general clothing and textile markets, although precious textiles and furs, with other valuables, would have their own enclosed market. The hierarchy descended through furniture, household goods and utensils until, with the most mundane of goods, the edge of the city - or its walls and gates - was reached. Nearest to city perimeters, where the caravans often assembled, were the ironmongers and smiths, and the other vendors and craftsmen serving the caravan trade: workers of large leather goods with metal finishings, such as saddles and bridles, the suppliers of sacking and string, tents and whatever else the long-distance traveller needed for his journey. As in the Classical world, Islamic süqs were normally covered, and if a statement applicable to the entire Islamic world can be made, it is that beaten earth, mud and wood tended to be replaced by brick and stone vaults or domes, whose most permanent expressions do not commonly survive from before the 15th century. Canvas awnings or tents, however, were the more usual protection for the markets that sold food-stuffs and livestock in open areas, transforming these areas into temporary but regularly occurring markets. Important exceptions were the horse markets of Mamlük Cairo and Aleppo, for horses were prestige wares in the Mamlük military aristocracy and were sold at the foot of the citadel inside the city walls. The stone façades of certain buildings in Mamluk Cairo, the madrasa of Sultan Hasan, for example, display a permanent reminder of these temporary markets: the fenestration on the side of the building facing the maydän, an open area, does not begin for some metres from the ground, leaving a blank wall against which awnings could be pitched on market days. The segregation of goods and trades, so characteristic of Islamic markets, is also of Classical origin and was paralleled in medieval Byzantium: Ibn Battūta, visiting Constantinople in 1331, notices that its spacious paved bazaars were organized strictly according to what was being sold. He also remarks that each bazaar had gates that were closed at night. This is a feature of a specific Islamic market structure usually called the qaysäriyya, an oblong hall, roofed and colonnaded, often (and always in Ottoman Turkey) domed, with a door at one or both of the short sides that was securely locked at night. Its form is derived from the Classical basilica; its name is said to commemorate a covered market built in Antioch by Julius Caesar, and called kesária by the Byzantines. Security was its most important feature, as security had been the most evident feature of the large rooms carved out of living rock at Petra, with their single openings and their small recesses for the deposit of relatively small objects or parcels of value. The Ottoman qaysariyya, the bedesten, was a similar internal strong-room, always located at the heart of the market area. It housed the trade in valuable objects just as London's Burlington Arcade does today: precious metals, gems, and the richest textiles. Gold and silver were naturally linked to other financial activities: coinage, taxation, and money-changing. Thus qaysariyyas often became the fiscal centre of government, where taxes and duty were collected and funds distributed for the upkeep of municipal institutions. It is no coincidence that the mint of Shah 'Abbās I was included in the qaysariyya he erected at one end of the Maydän-i Shāh. The same structure also housed his Royal Caravanserai, with its decorated galleries that looked out over the maydan, and the shops where were sold the valuable silk textiles that were part of his planned economy. The Islamic silk trade, both raw silk and finished fabrics, was almost always a state monopoly closely controlled by the central government, and its vending locales were equally closely supervised, whether in the alcaicería of Granada or in the Sandal Bedesten in the Kapalı Çarşı (the Great Covered Market) of Istanbul. After the süqs, fanning out from the congregational mosque, and the qaysäriyya, or monumental strong-room, warehouses are the third basic element of the Islamic market. Known by a variety of names, of which khān is the most common, warehouses were generally two or three storeys high and rectangular or square in plan, with a single portal. On the upper floors, galleries gave access to small rooms of approximately the same size, with windows, and chimneys if the climate required, while historical and regional differences dictated innumerable variations in roofing and the disposition of other details. The chambers for merchants, where their merchandise could also be deposited, were usually on the upper floors, and the ground floor was originally used for stables and shops, together with large-scale storage, although with time the stables tended to be removed elsewhere in the market. Clearly, the standard form of most warehouses is related to the caravanserai, but both form and function continue to be modified by the urban setting of the structure and its specific purpose. In the early Islamic centuries, if we may judge from the warehouses excavated in the important Gulf port of Siraf, shops were not an architectural component of khāns, as they were later to become. Siraf had, instead, a warehouse with an entrance hall that opened onto an oblong courtyard surrounded by rooms of various sizes. The areas excavated to date in Siraf that might have served as shops appear to be rudimentary in the extreme, many almost as small as the compartments in the Petra warehouses and, therefore, not much larger than the lockers of modern bus stations. At the other end of the scale are the samsara, the khāns of San'a' in the Yemen, sometimes six or seven storeys high. Throughout Islamic history, the complement of khāns built in a city at a given time provides a good index to its commercial prosperity. In Aleppo in the 14th, 16th and 17th centuries, in Bursa in the mid-14th century, in Istanbul from the middle of the 15th century, and in Damascus and Cairo as late as the 18th century, the ruler and his family, as well as wealthy officials and private citizens, built warehouses in what was originally a fruitful use of surplus capital, but was to become increasingly a conservative and unproductive one. In most Muslim cities khāns in the midst of the central market are still used today for storage, if no longer for merchants' lodgings or for manufacture. Others, especially those in Aleppo built for European merchants, remained a focal point of commercial, political and social life abroad, as exemplified by that which became the French consulate. Warehouses were also built by officials and private individuals as pious works, made waqf for the benefit of a particular quarter or a specific monument - a mosque, madrasa or a convent - in the same way that hammāms were so endowed. The Hammam al-Bzouria in the grain suq in Damascus, for example, was built by the Zangid ruler Nür ad-Din Mahmūd some time between 1154 and 1172 to provide income for his madrasa, erected in 1172 in the same quarter of the market. The accumulated practice of centuries came to ordain that the Muslim patron include a hammām in an architectural complex he endowed, whether strictly commercial or religious, as in the 14th-century necropolis of the Marinid dynasty at Chella, on the outskirts of Rabat. ## Caravanserais Leaving Cairo for Damascus in July of 1326, Ibn Battūta travelled on the main road connecting Egypt with Palestine and Syria, staying not in the colleges and convents, as had been his custom in North Africa and Egypt, but in caravanserais: 'At each of these stations between Cairo and Gaza there is a hostelry which they call a khăn, where travellers alight with their beast, and outside each khãn is a public watering-place and a shop at which he may buy what he requires for himself and his beast.' Ibn Battuta's statement perfectly summarizes the function of the classic Islamic caravanserai, though certain aspects, the exterior shops and watering-place, may be unique to Syria in the 14th century. But almost any Islamic caravanserai presents to the traveller a square or rectangular walled exterior, with a single portal wide enough to permit large or heavily laden beasts such as camels to enter. The courtyard is almost always open to the sky, and along the inside walls of the enclosure are ranged a number of identical stalls, bays, niches or chambers to accommodate merchants and their servants, their animals and their merchandise. Water is provided in some way, for washing and for ritual ablution, and some later caravanserais have elaborate baths. From the earliest period fodder for the animals and the stables were separated from the lodgings for travellers. Later and larger caravanserais might have special rooms or suites in the entrance block for important guests, and a resident staff of caretakers might be permanently housed in small rooms in the portal block. Shops for travellers to replenish their supplies and for merchants to dispose of some of their wares are often found, from the 14th century onwards, and some of the later caravanserais were so well provided for, with mills, bakeries and tea-shops, that they came to resemble small villages. Among the earliest surviving Islamic caravanserais are the Syrian remains of Qasr al-Hayr, East and West, the former only recently identified as such. Here, recent excavations have disclosed a paved courtyard with a portal; a series of twenty-eight tunnel-vaulted rooms; two rooms at opposite corners almost certainly destined for storage, to judge from their internal disposition; half-round towers, which seem to have had no function except to house latrines; and a small mihrab-like niche on the south side of the entrance. These features, with the probable absence of a reception hall on the upper storey, proclaim the Lesser Enclosure of Qasr al-Hayr East to be a caravanserai, and not a palace, as had been formerly thought. The same plan and basic components are found, though in less elaborate fashion, at Chah-i Siyah (Chaleh Siah), near Isfahan, which can probably be dated between 770 and 785. Chah-i Siyah is particularly notable because the monotony of its interior walls, with identical small rooms opening onto the courtyard from under a portico, is interrupted on the axes by four îwāns, larger arched rooms open to the court. This neutral and flexible plan will thereafter characterize almost all Iranian caravanserais, as well as Iranian religious buildings, mosques and madrasas; although, at an early stage, the plans of early caravanserais most closely resemble forts, or ribāts (already described in Chapter 2). Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish caravanserais from ribāts by plan alone.