1. Battuta's Travels

Ibn Battuta may have travelled farther than any other person in history up to his time; certainly his account describes more travel than any other pre-jet age explorer on record.

It all started in the year 1325, in Morocco, when the 21 year old set out on his hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Mecca expected of all followers of Islam. This trip could take a year to a year and a half. But Ibn Battuta found he loved travel, and also encountered a Sufi wise man who told him that he would eventually visit the entire Islamic world. Battuta spent the next two decades doing just that kind of exploring, and then finally returned home to write about it.

1.1. The Haj

He travelled to Mecca overland, following the North African coast across the sultanates of Abd al-Wadid and Hafsid. He took a bride in the town of Sfax,^[1] the first in a series of marriages that would feature in his travels.^[2]

In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over 3,500 km (2,200 mi), Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, at the time part of the Bahri Mamluk empire. He met two ascetic pious men in Alexandria. One was Sheikh Burhanuddin who is supposed to have foretold the destiny of Ibn Battuta as a world traveller saying "It seems to me that you are fond of foreign travel. You will visit my brother Fariduddin in India , Rukonuddin in Sind and Burhanuddin in China . Convey my greetings to them". Another pious man Sheikh Murshidi interpreted the meaning of a dream of Ibn Battuta that he was meant to be a world traveller.^[3][4]

At this point, he began a lifelong habit of making side-trips instead of getting where he was going. He spent several weeks visiting sites in the area, and then headed inland to Cairo, the capital of the Mamluk Sultanate and an important city. Of the three usual routes to Mecca, Ibn Battuta chose the least-travelled, which involved a journey up the Nile valley, then east to the Red Sea port of Aydhab.^[5] Upon approaching the town, however, a local rebellion forced him to turn back.^[6]

He returned to Cairo and took a second side trip, this time to Mamluk-controlled Damascus. He described travelling on a complicated zig-zag route across Palestine in which he visited more than twenty cities.

After spending the Muslim month of Ramadan in Damascus, he joined a caravan travelling the 1,300 km (810 mi) south to Medina, site of the Mosque of the Islamic prophet Muhammad. After four days in the town, he journeyed on to Mecca, where upon completing his pilgrimage he took the honorific status of El-Hajji. Rather than returning home, Ibn Battuta decided to continue traveling, choosing as his next destination the Ilkhanate, a Mongol Khanate, to the northeast.^[7]

Ibn Battuta then started back toward Iraq,^[8] but got diverted on a six-month detour that took him into Persia. Finally, he returned across to Baghdad, arriving there in 1327.^[9]

In Baghdad, he found Abu Sa'id, the last Mongol ruler of the unified Ilkhanate, leaving the city and heading north with a large retinue.^[10] Ibn Battuta joined the royal caravan for a while, then turned north on the Silk Road to Tabriz.

1.2. Second Pilgrimage to Mecca

Ibn Battuta left again for Baghdad, probably in July, but first took an excursion northwards along the river Tigris. He visited Mosul, where he was the guest of the Ilkhanate governor,^[11] and then the towns of Cizre (Jazirat ibn 'Umar) and Mardin in modern-day Turkey. At a hermitage on a mountain near Sinjar, he met a Kurdish mystic who gave him some silver coins.^[12][13] Once back in Mosul, he joined a "feeder" caravan of pilgrims heading south to Baghdad, where they would meet up with the main caravan that crossed the Arabian Desert to Mecca. Ill with diarrhoea, he arrived in the city weak and exhausted for his second hajj.^[14]

From Aden, Ibn Battuta embarked on a ship heading for Zeila on the coast of Somalia. Later he would visit Mogadishu, the then pre-eminent city of the "Land of the Berbers" (بلد البربر Balad al-Barbar, the medieval Arabic term for the Horn of Africa).^[15][16][17]

Ibn Battuta arrived in Mogadishu in 1331, at the zenith of its prosperity. He described it as "an exceedingly large city" with many rich merchants, noted for its high-quality fabric that was exported to other countries, including Egypt.^[18] Ibn Battuta added that the city was ruled by a Somali Sultan, Abu Bakr ibn Sayx 'Umar,^[19][20] who was originally from Berbera in northern Somalia and spoke both Somali (referred to by Battuta as Mogadishan, the Benadir dialect of Somali) and Arabic with equal fluency.^[20][21] The Sultan also had a retinue of wazirs (ministers), legal experts, commanders, royal eunuchs, and assorted hangers-on at his beck and call.^[20]

Ibn Battuta continued by ship south to the Swahili Coast, a region then known in Arabic as the Bilad al-Zanj ("Land of the Zanj"),^[22] with an overnight stop at the island town of Mombasa.^[23] Although relatively small at the time, Mombasa would become important in the following century.^[24] After a journey along the coast, Ibn Battuta next arrived in the island town of Kilwa in present-day Tanzania,^[25] which had become an important transit centre of the gold trade.^[26] He described the city as "one of the finest and most beautifully built towns; all the buildings are of wood, and the houses are roofed with dīs reeds".^[27]

1.3. Byzantium

After his third pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Battuta decided to seek employment with the Muslim Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq. In the autumn of 1330 (or 1332), he set off for the Seljuk controlled territory of Anatolia with the intention of taking an overland route to India .^[28]

From this point the itinerary across Anatolia in the Rihla is confused. Ibn Battuta describes travelling westwards from Eğirdir to Milas and then skipping 420 km (260 mi) eastward past Eğirdir to Konya. He then continues travelling in an easterly direction, reaching Erzurum from where he skips 1,160 km (720 mi) back to Birgi which lies north of Milas.^[29] Historians believe that Ibn Battuta visited a number of towns in central Anatolia, but not in the order that he describes.^[30][31]

When they reached Astrakhan, Öz Beg Khan had just given permission for one of his pregnant wives, Princess Bayalun, a daughter of Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos, to return to her home city of Constantinople to give birth. Ibn Battuta talked his way into this expedition, which would be his first beyond the boundaries of the Islamic world.^[32]

Arriving in Constantinople towards the end of 1332 (or 1334), he met the Byzantine emperor Andronikos III Palaiologos. He visited the great church of Hagia Sophia and spoke with an Eastern Orthodox priest about his travels in the city of Jerusalem. After a month in the city, Ibn Battuta returned to Astrakhan, then arrived in the capital city Sarai al-Jadid and reported the accounts of his travels to Sultan Öz Beg Khan (r. 1313–1341). Then he continued past the Caspian and Aral Seas to Bukhara and Samarkand, where he visited the court of another Mongolian king, Tarmashirin (r. 1331–1334) of the Chagatai Khanate.^[33] From there, he journeyed south to Afghanistan, then crossed into India via the mountain passes of the Hindu Kush.^[34] In the Rihla, he mentions these mountains and the history of the range in slave trading.^[35][36] He wrote,

After this I proceeded to the city of Barwan, in the road to which is a high mountain, covered with snow and exceedingly cold; they call it the Hindu Kush, that is Hindu-slayer, because most of the slaves brought tither from India die on account of the intenseness of the cold.

—Ibn Battuta, Chapter XIII, Rihla – Khorasan^[36][37]

1.4. India

Ibn Battuta and his party reached the Indus River on 12 September 1333.^[38] From there, he made his way to Delhi and became acquainted with the sultan, Muhammad bin Tughluq.

On the strength of his years of study in Mecca, Ibn Battuta was appointed a qadi, or judge, by the sultan.^[39] However, he found it difficult to enforce Islamic law beyond the sultan's court in Delhi, due to lack of Islamic appeal in India .^[40]

The Sultan was erratic even by the standards of the time and for six years Ibn Battuta veered between living the high life of a trusted subordinate and falling under suspicion of treason for a variety of offences. His plan to leave on the pretext of taking another hajj was stymied by the Sultan. The opportunity for Battuta to leave Delhi finally arose in 1341 when an embassy arrived from Yuan dynasty China asking for permission to rebuild a Himalayan Buddhist temple popular with China pilgrims.^[41][42]

1.5. China

Ibn Battuta was given charge of the embassy but en route to the coast at the start of the journey to China , he and his large retinue were attacked by a group of bandits.^[43] Separated from his companions, he was robbed and nearly lost his life.^[44] Despite this setback, within ten days he had caught up with his group and continued on to Khambhat in the India state of Gujarat. From there, they sailed to Calicut (now known as Kozhikode), where Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama would land two centuries later. While in Calicut, Battuta was the guest of the ruling Zamorin.^[39] While Ibn Battuta visited a mosque on shore, a storm arose and one of the ships of his expedition sank.^[45] The other ship then sailed without him only to be seized by a local Sumatran king a few months later.

In 1345, Ibn Battuta travelled on to Samudra Pasai Sultanate in present-day Aceh, Northern Sumatra, where he notes in his travel log that the ruler of Samudra Pasai was a pious Muslim named Sultan Al-Malik Al-Zahir Jamal-ad-Din, who performed his religious duties with utmost zeal and often waged campaigns against animists in the region. The island of Sumatra, according to Ibn Battuta, was rich in camphor, areca nut, cloves, and tin.^[46]

The madh'hab he observed was Imam Al-Shafi‘i, whose customs were similar to those he had previously seen in coastal India, especially among the Mappila Muslims, who were also followers of Imam Al-Shafi‘i. At that time Samudra Pasai marked the end of Dar al-Islam, because no territory east of this was ruled by a Muslim. Here he stayed for about two weeks in the wooden walled town as a guest of the sultan, and then the sultan provided him with supplies and sent him on his way on one of his own junks to China .^[46]

Ibn Battuta first sailed to Malacca on the Malay Peninsula which he called "Mul Jawi". He met the ruler of Malacca and stayed as a guest for three days.

In the year 1345 Ibn Battuta arrived at Quanzhou in China 's Fujian province, then under the rule of the Mongols. One of the first things he noted was that Muslims referred to the city as "Zaitun" (meaning olive), but Ibn Battuta could not find any olives anywhere. He mentioned local artists and their mastery in making portraits of newly arrived foreigners; these were for security purposes. Ibn Battuta praised the craftsmen and their silk and porcelain; as well as fruits such as plums and watermelons and the advantages of paper money.^[47]

He then travelled south along the China coast to Guangzhou, where he lodged for two weeks with one of the city's wealthy merchants.^[48]

Ibn Battuta travelled from Beijing to Hangzhou, and then proceeded to Fuzhou. Upon his return to Quanzhou, he soon boarded a China junk owned by the Sultan of Samudera Pasai Sultanate heading for Southeast Asia, whereupon Ibn Battuta was unfairly charged a hefty sum by the crew and lost much of what he had collected during his stay in China.^[49]

1.6. Al-Andalus / Spain

After a few days in Tangier, Ibn Battuta set out for a trip to the Muslim-controlled territory of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. King Alfonso XI of Castile and León had threatened to attack Gibraltar, so in 1350, Ibn Battuta joined a group of Muslims leaving Tangier with the intention of defending the port.^[50] By the time he arrived, the Black Death had killed Alfonso and the threat of invasion had receded, so he turned the trip into a sight-seeing tour, travelling through Valencia and ending up in Granada.^[51]

After his departure from al-Andalus he decided to travel through Morocco. On his return home, he stopped for a while in Marrakech, which was almost a ghost town following the recent plague and the transfer of the capital to Fez.^[52]

In the autumn of 1351, Ibn Battuta left Fez and made his way to the town of Sijilmasa on the northern edge of the Sahara in present-day Morocco.^[53] There he bought a number of camels and stayed for four months. He set out again with a caravan in February 1352 and after 25 days arrived at the dry salt lake bed of Taghaza with its salt mines. All of the local buildings were made from slabs of salt by the slaves of the Masufa tribe, who cut the salt in thick slabs for transport by camel. Taghaza was a commercial centre and awash with Malian gold, though Ibn Battuta did not form a favourable impression of the place, recording that it was plagued by flies and the water was brackish.^[54]

1.7. Mali Empire

After a ten-day stay in Taghaza, the caravan set out for the oasis of Tasarahla (probably Bir al-Ksaib)^[55][56] where it stopped for three days in preparation for the last and most difficult leg of the journey across the vast desert. From Tasarahla, a Masufa scout was sent ahead to the oasis town of Oualata, where he arranged for water to be transported a distance of four days travel where it would meet the thirsty caravan. Oualata was the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade route and had recently become part of the Mali Empire. Altogether, the caravan took two months to cross the 1,600 km (990 mi) of desert from Sijilmasa.^[57]

Azalai salt caravan from Agadez to Bilma, Niger. https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?curid=1688727

From there, Ibn Battuta travelled southwest along a river he believed to be the Nile (it was actually the river Niger), until he reached the capital of the Mali Empire.^[58] There he met Mansa Suleyman, king since 1341. Ibn Battuta disapproved of the fact that female slaves, servants and even the daughters of the sultan went about exposing parts of their bodies not befitting a Muslim.^[59] He left the capital in February accompanied by a local Malian merchant and journeyed overland by camel to Timbuktu.^[60] Though in the next two centuries it would become the most important city in the region, at that time it was a small city and relatively unimportant.^[61] It was during this journey that Ibn Battuta first encountered a hippopotamus. The animals were feared by the local boatmen and hunted with lances to which strong cords were attached.^[62] After a short stay in Timbuktu, Ibn Battuta journeyed down the Niger to Gao in a canoe carved from a single tree. At the time Gao was an important commercial center.^[63]

After spending a month in Gao, Ibn Battuta set off with a large caravan for the oasis of Takedda. On his journey across the desert, he received a message from the Sultan of Morocco commanding him to return home. He set off for Sijilmasa in September 1353, accompanying a large caravan transporting 600 female slaves, and arrived back in Morocco early in 1354.^[64]

Ibn Battuta's itinerary gives scholars a glimpse as to when Islam first began to spread into the heart of west Africa.^[65]

2. The Travelogue

After returning home from his travels in 1354, and at the suggestion of the Marinid ruler of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, Ibn Battuta dictated an account in Arabic of his journeys to Ibn Juzayy, a scholar whom he had previously met in Granada. The account is the only source for Ibn Battuta's adventures. The full title of the manuscript may be translated as A Masterpiece to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling (تحفة النظار في غرائب الأمصار وعجائب الأسفار, Tuḥfat an-Nuẓẓār fī Gharāʾib al-Amṣār wa ʿAjāʾib al-Asfār).^[66][67] However, it is often simply referred to as The Travels (الرحلة, Rihla),^[68] in reference to a standard form of Arabic literature.

There is no indication that Ibn Battuta made any notes or had any journal during his twenty-nine years of travelling.^[69] When he came to dictate an account of his experiences he had to rely on memory and manuscripts produced by earlier travellers. Ibn Juzayy did not acknowledge his sources and presented some of the earlier descriptions as Ibn Battuta's own observations. When describing Damascus, Mecca, Medina and some other places in the Middle East, he clearly copied passages from the account by the Andalusian Ibn Jubayr which had been written more than 150 years earlier.^[70] Similarly, most of Ibn Juzayy's descriptions of places in Palestine were copied from an account by the 13th-century traveller Muhammad al-Abdari.^[71]

Many scholars of the Oriental studies do not believe that Ibn Battuta visited all the places he described, arguing that in order to provide a comprehensive description of places in the Muslim world, he relied at least in part on hearsay evidence, making use of accounts by earlier travellers. For example, it is considered very unlikely that Ibn Battuta made a trip up the Volga River from New Sarai to visit Bolghar,^[72] and there are serious doubts about a number of other journeys such as his trip to Sana'a in Yemen,^[73] his journey from Balkh to Bistam in Khorasan^[74] and his trip around Anatolia.^[75]

Ibn Battuta's claim that a Maghrebian called "Abu'l Barakat the Berber" converted the Maldives to Islam is contradicted by an entirely different story which says that the Maldives were converted to Islam after miracles were performed by a Tabrizi named Maulana Shaikh Yusuf Shams-ud-din according to the Tarikh, the official history of the Maldives.^[76]

Some scholars have also questioned whether he really visited China .^[77] Ibn Battuta may have plagiarized entire sections of his descriptions of China lifted from works by other authors like "Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar" by Shihab al-Umari, Sulaiman al-Tajir, and possibly from Al Juwayni, Rashid-al-Din Hamadani and an Alexander romance. Furthermore, Ibn Battuta's description and Marco Polo's writings share extremely similar sections and themes, with some of the same commentary, e.g. it is unlikely that the 3rd Caliph Uthman ibn Affan had someone with the exact identical name in China who was encountered by Ibn Battuta.^[78]

However, even if the Rihla is not fully based on what its author personally witnessed, it provides an important account of much of the 14th-century world. Concubines were used by Ibn Battuta such as in Delhi.^{[79]:111–13, 137, 141, 238[80]} He wedded several women, divorced at least some of them, and in Damascus, Malabar, Delhi, Bukhara, and the Maldives had children by them or by concubines.^[81] Ibn Battuta insulted Greeks as "enemies of Allah", drunkards and "swine eaters", while at the same time in Ephesus he purchased and used a Greek girl who was one of his many slave girls in his "harem" through Byzantium, Khorasan, Africa, and Palestine.^[82] It was two decades before he again returned to find out what happened to one of his wives and child in Damascus.^[83]

Ibn Battuta often experienced culture shock in regions he visited where the local customs of recently converted peoples did not fit in with his orthodox Muslim background. Among the Turks and Mongols, he was astonished at the freedom and respect enjoyed by women and remarked that on seeing a Turkish couple in a bazaar one might assume that the man was the woman's servant when he was in fact her husband.^[84] He also felt that dress customs in the Maldives, and some sub-Saharan regions in Africa were too revealing.

Little is known about Ibn Battuta's life after completion of his Rihla in 1355. He was appointed a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369.^[85]

Ibn Battuta's work was unknown outside the Muslim world until the beginning of the 19th century, when the German traveller-explorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811) acquired a collection of manuscripts in the Middle East, among which was a 94-page volume containing an abridged version of Ibn Juzayy's text. Three extracts were published in 1818 by the German orientalist Johann Kosegarten.^[86] A fourth extract was published the following year.^[87] French scholars were alerted to the initial publication by a lengthy review published in the Journal de Savants by the orientalist Silvestre de Sacy.^[88]

Three copies of another abridged manuscript were acquired by the Swiss traveller Johann Burckhardt and bequeathed to the University of Cambridge. He gave a brief overview of their content in a book published posthumously in 1819.^[89] The Arabic text was translated into English by the orientalist Samuel Lee and published in London in 1829.^[90]

In the 1830s, during the French occupation of Algeria, the Bibliothèque Nationale (BNF) in Paris acquired five manuscripts of Ibn Battuta's travels, in which two were complete.^[91] One manuscript containing just the second part of the work is dated 1356 and is believed to be Ibn Juzayy's autograph.^[92] The BNF manuscripts were used in 1843 by the Irish-French orientalist Baron de Slane to produce a translation into French of Ibn Battuta's visit to Sudan.^[93] They were also studied by the French scholars Charles Defrémery and Beniamino Sanguinetti. Beginning in 1853 they published a series of four volumes containing a critical edition of the Arabic text together with a translation into French.^[94] In their introduction Defrémery and Sanguinetti praised Lee's annotations but were critical of his translation which they claimed lacked precision, even in straightforward passages.^[95]

In 1929, exactly a century after the publication of Lee's translation, the historian and orientalist Hamilton Gibb published an English translation of selected portions of Defrémery and Sanguinetti's Arabic text.^[96] Gibb had proposed to the Hakluyt Society in 1922 that he should prepare an annotated translation of the entire Rihla into English.^[97] His intention was to divide the translated text into four volumes, each volume corresponding to one of the volumes published by Defrémery and Sanguinetti. The first volume was not published until 1958.^[98] Gibb died in 1971, having completed the first three volumes. The fourth volume was prepared by Charles Beckingham and published in 1994.^[99] Defrémery and Sanguinetti's printed text has now been translated into number of other languages.