The Radhanites: Jewish merchants from Francia to China

Ibn Khordadbeh served the caliph as postmaster: his business was roads, staging posts and intelligence. About 870 he compiled the Book of Roads and Kingdoms—a handbook for administration, not a book for reading. In it stand a few lines from which we know nearly all we know of the Radhanites.

He lists their languages: Arabic, Persian, Greek, Frankish, Spanish, Slavonic. He describes four routes. All four begin in the valley of the Rhone in southern France and end on the eastern coast of China; they run by sea through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, and overland through Baghdad, the Caspian and Central Asia—and back the same way.

He lists the goods as well. From the east they bring musk, aloes, camphor and cinnamon. From the west, brocade, castoreum, marten and other furs, and swords. And people: eunuchs, slave women and boys. We set this down plainly and do not soften it. The ninth century traded in human beings everywhere, and these merchants traded in them too; whoever reads history for comfort will not be deceived by us.

Why such a road lay open to Jews in particular is clear from the hundred years before. Between the Christian West and the Muslim East ran a frontier that a merchant from either side crossed as a stranger. A Jew had kin on both sides, one law, one reckoning of the days, and a letter to a community at every stop. For the same reason Charlemagne sent Isaac to the caliph (see 4562).

And a caution that cannot be left out. The Radhanites are known almost only from these lines and from Ibn al-Faqih, who copied Ibn Khordadbeh in the early tenth century. Where the name itself comes from is disputed: from the district of Radhan near Baghdad, or from the Persian rah-dan, one who knows the way. Beyond what is said we say nothing.