Flourished 921-923
Traveler

Journey to Russia. Little is known about the life of Ibn Fadlan. He was probably of non-Arab ancestry, and he seems to have been in the service of a high-ranking official of the Abbasid court in Baghdad. In June 921 he left Baghdad with a party of jurists and teachers on an embassy to the king of the Volga Bulgars, who had invited Khalifah al-Muqtadir to send instruction on Islam to his people. The journey took approximately two years, and the only surviving account of it is a narrative by Ibn Fadlan. His observations of the various Turkic peoples across whose territory the embassy traveled are an invaluable source for the history and ethnography of Central Asia, as are his descriptions of the Rus, the Scandinavian warrior-traders who traversed the rivers of Russia, in whose name their historical role survives. At one point in...