Markets and Caravanserais
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 in­
stitution 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 tech­
niques 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 Mahmud of Kashghar, in the
11 th 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 hammam, 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
khans, the urban equivalent of the caravanserai. Any
Muslim settlement with a market also had a number of
hammams, 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, khans, the secured structure and a hammam
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 hammam — 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-
suq (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-suq, or chahar-su, for the
major intersections within the covered network of
market streets; and the Turkish carsi, the whole
market complex.
In the lands that had been part of the Classical world
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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 suqs 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 Mamluk Cairo and Aleppo, for horses were prestige
wares in the Mamluk military aristocracy and were
sold at the foot of the citadel inside the city walls. The
stone facades 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
maydan, 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 characteris­
tic of Islamic markets, is also of Classical origin and was
paralleled in medieval Byzantium: Ibn Battuta,
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 qaysariyya, an oblong hall, roofed and
colonnaded, often (and always in Ottoman Turkey)
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Trade and Travel
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 kesaria 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 ac­
tivities : coinage, taxation, and money-changing. Thus
qaysariyyas often became the fiscal centre of govern­
ment, where taxes and duty were collected and funds
distributed for the upkeep of municipal institutions. It
is no coincidence that the mint of Shah ’Abbas I was
included in the qaysariyya he erected at one end of the
Maydan-I Shah. 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 govern­
ment, and its vending locales were equally closely
supervised, whether in the alcaiceria of Granada or in
the Sandal Bedesten in the Kapali Carsi (the Great
Covered Market) of Istanbul.
After the suqs, fanning out from the congregational
mosque, and the qaysariyya, or monumental strong­
room, warehouses are the third basic element of the
Islamic market. Known by a variety of names, of which
khan 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 approxi­
mately 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
Markets and Caravanserais
the warehouses excavated in the important Gulf port
of Siraf, shops were not an architectural component of
khans, 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 khans of San’a’ in
the Yemen, sometimes six or seven storeys high.
Throughout Islamic history, the complement of khans
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 khans 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
hammams were so endowed. The Hammam al-Bzouria
in the grain siiq in Damascus, for example, was built by
the Zangid ruler Nur ad-Din Mahmud 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 hammam 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
Battuta 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 khan, where travellers alight with
their beast, and outside each khan 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
iwans, 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 ribats (already described in
Chapter 2). Indeed, it is often difficult to distinguish
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