Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta was a Muslim legal scholar from Tangier, in Morocco, who between 1325 and 1354 journeyed across North and East Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, South-East Asia and China, and later crossed the Sahara to West Africa. His dictated account, known as the Rihla, or "journey", is one of the richest descriptions of the fourteenth-century world, though scholars doubt that he saw every place it describes. His total distance has been estimated at around 117,000 kilometres.

Born in Tangier on 24 February 1304 into a family of Berber descent that produced religious judges, he trained in Maliki Islamic law. On 14 June 1325, aged twenty-one, he left home to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, expecting to be away for perhaps sixteen months. He would not see Morocco again for twenty-four years. Travelling along the North African coast to Alexandria and Cairo, then through Syria under the Mamluk Sultanate, he reached Mecca in late 1326.

Instead of going home, he joined a caravan to Iraq, visited the shrine of Ali at Najaf, toured Persian cities such as Isfahan and Shiraz, and saw Baghdad still scarred by the Mongol sack of 1258. After a long stay in Mecca he sailed down the Red Sea to Yemen and along the East African coast, describing the wealthy trading cities of Mogadishu and Kilwa.

Hoping for employment with Muhammad bin Tughluq, sultan of Delhi, he took a roundabout route through Anatolia, where he met the Ottoman ruler Orhan, and across the Black Sea to the Golden Horde. He claims to have travelled with a Byzantine princess married to the khan Özbeg to Constantinople, then crossed Central Asia to Bukhara and Samarkand. He reached the Indus on 12 September 1333. In the Delhi Sultanate the sultan made him a judge, and he spent about six years alternating between favour and fear of the ruler's anger.

In 1341 the sultan sent him as envoy to the Mongol emperor of China. Bandits robbed him on the way, and at Calicut a storm wrecked part of the fleet. He spent about nine months as chief judge in the Maldives, where he imposed strict penalties and married into the ruling family, then visited Sri Lanka and Bengal. In 1345 he reached Quanzhou in Yuan dynasty China. His descriptions of Chinese cities, ships and paper money contain errors, and some passages may borrow from other writers, so some scholars question whether he went as far as Beijing.

On his way back in 1348 he found the Black Death raging through Syria and Egypt; he reported thousands dying daily in Damascus. Arriving in Morocco in 1349, he learned that his mother had died a few months earlier. He then visited Granada in Muslim Spain and, in 1352, crossed the Sahara by way of the salt mines of Taghaza to the Mali Empire, where he met Mansa Suleyman and visited Timbuktu and Gao. He returned home early in 1354, recalled by the sultan of Morocco.

At the request of the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris, he dictated his memories to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, who completed the text around 1355. He seems to have had no notes, and Ibn Juzayy copied some descriptions from earlier travellers such as Ibn Jubayr. Modern scholars think some journeys, such as the trip to Bolghar on the Volga, are unlikely; others point to manuscripts he copied in Damascus in 1326 that confirm parts of his chronology. The book also records his own acquisition of enslaved women and his disparaging views of some peoples he met. He spent his last years as a judge in his homeland, dying in 1368 or 1369. His work was little known in Europe until the nineteenth century.

Our 1300 and 1400 maps bracket his travels, showing the Mamluk Sultanate, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mongol successor states and the Mali Empire he visited.