Ibn Fadlan among the Volga Bulgars

In the year 921 the Abbasid caliph al-Muqtadir (rahimahu Allah) sent an embassy from Baghdad to the distant king of the Volga Bulgars, a Turkic people who dwelt far to the north, on the middle course of the great river Volga, at the edge of the known world. The king, having embraced Islam, had written to the caliph asking him to send learned men to instruct his people in the faith and the law, and to help him build a mosque and a fortress, partly to strengthen himself against his powerful pagan overlords, the Khazars. The embassy travelled for the better part of a year by the long caravan road up through Persia and Khwarazm and across the frozen steppes, enduring terrible cold, and reached the land of the Bulgars in 922. Among its members was Ahmad ibn Fadlan, who acted as the embassy's secretary and religious authority, and who wrote an account of the journey, his Risala, that is one of the most precious and vivid sources in all medieval geography. In it he describes, with the wonder and the sharp eye of a man of the civilised south thrown among strange northern peoples, the Bulgars and their king and their conversion, the customs and the fearsome funeral rites of the Rus (the Norsemen of the river-trade, whom he watched at close hand), and the nomads of the steppe, recording a world that would otherwise be almost lost to history. The embassy marks the reach of the Abbasid caliphate and the spread of Islam to its far northern frontier, among peoples whose Muslim descendants, the Tatars and others, endure to this day. This scene depicts the embassy at the river-camp of the Bulgars. In keeping with the project's ethics any figure is anonymous and at a distance.