ABSTRACT
Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb (al-Isrā’īlī al-Ṭurṭūshī; ibn Yūsuf?), a Jewish (probably, Sephardic) traveler from Tortosa in Spain, who lived in the middle of the tenth century, visited personally Emperor Otto in Magdeburg in 965, the kingdom of Nakon of Obodrites, Bohemia, including Prague, and, supposedly, the Slavic lands of Poland, including Krakow and Bulgaria. Whether a merchant or a special envoy on an intelligence mission for the Umayyad caliphate of Spain, his account was presented to the Caliph of Córdoba al-Ḥakam II (961–976) but subsequently lost. Preserved in al-Bakrī's Kitāb al-masālik wa’l-mamālik (Book of Roads and Kingdoms, ad 1068), his account is full of geo- and ethno-linguistic cultural earmarks of the local Rus’ and Slavs, Germans and Magyars; a shrewd observer, he was interested in local hygiene, diseases, the healing practices, and religious rites of the Slavs; he also identified their parlance (al-Ṣaqlabiyyah) as the language of everyday communication in east-central Europe. Despite being fragmentary, Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb's account of the country of Mieszko I is interesting. He writes about the local climate, agriculture, religion, customs, clothing, musical instruments, goods, and even the construction of a bath. Neglected by Arab-Muslim researchers, Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‘qūb's travelogue has been largely appreciated by European scholars.
