Ibn Battuta's Travels (1325-1354): Journeys Across Islam

Ibn Battuta was a Moroccan scholar who left his home town of Tangier in June 1325 to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not return for good until 1354. In those three decades he travelled through most of the Islamic world and beyond, from West Africa and Spain to India, the Maldives and China, covering an estimated 117,000 kilometres. His account of these journeys, the Rihla, is one of the richest sources for life in Africa and Asia in the 14th century.

Background: a world connected by Islam

Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born in Tangier on 24 February 1304 into a family of Berber origin with a tradition of legal scholarship. He studied Islamic law of the Maliki school, which was the usual training for judges and teachers in North Africa.

In the early 14th century the Islamic world stretched from Morocco and Spain to India and Indonesia. Although it was divided into many states, from the Marinids of Morocco and the Mamluks of Egypt to the Delhi Sultanate and the Mongol khanates, it shared Arabic as a language of religion and learning, and a common body of law. A trained scholar could find work and hospitality in courts and cities thousands of kilometres from home. The Mongol empires, now partly Muslim, also kept the long overland routes across Asia relatively open.

What happened: the journeys

The Rihla is not a day-by-day diary, and its chronology is sometimes confused. Historians, especially Ross Dunn, have reconstructed the main stages roughly as follows.

North Africa, Egypt and the first pilgrimage (1325-1327)

Ibn Battuta set out alone from Tangier on 14 June 1325, aged 21. He crossed North Africa by land, joining caravans for safety, and reached Alexandria in spring 1326. He admired Cairo, then one of the largest cities in the world, travelled through Palestine and Syria and spent Ramadan 1326 in Damascus.

He joined the pilgrim caravan to Mecca and completed his first hajj in late 1326. Instead of going home, he continued into Iraq and Persia, visiting Basra, Isfahan, Shiraz, Tabriz and Baghdad, still scarred by the Mongol sack of 1258.

Arabia and East Africa (c. 1327-1332)

Ibn Battuta then spent a period studying in Mecca. Around 1330 or 1331, according to the most common reconstruction, he sailed down the Red Sea to Yemen and then along the East African coast. He described the trading cities of Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa, where Muslim merchants and rulers linked Africa with Arabia and India. He returned by way of Oman and Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.

Anatolia, the steppe and Constantinople (c. 1332-1333)

Next he crossed Anatolia, then divided among Turkish principalities, and met their rulers, among them Orhan, the second Ottoman ruler, at Bursa. He crossed the Black Sea to the lands of the Golden Horde, where he joined the travelling camp of the khan Özbeg.

According to the Rihla, he accompanied one of Özbeg’s wives, a Byzantine princess, on a visit to her father’s city of Constantinople, where he toured the city and met a former emperor. He then crossed Central Asia through Bukhara and Samarkand and reached India through Afghanistan.

India and the Delhi Sultanate (c. 1334-1341)

Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi around 1334. Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, famous for both his generosity and his cruelty, appointed him a qadi (judge) with a large salary. He stayed for about seven years, living lavishly, falling into debt and at one point fearing for his life when he fell out of favour (see Ibn Battuta in India).

In 1341 the sultan chose him to lead an embassy to the Mongol Yuan emperor of China. The mission went badly wrong: the party was attacked on the way to the coast, and at Calicut the ships carrying the gifts were wrecked in a storm.

The Maldives, Sri Lanka and the voyage east (c. 1342-1346)

Afraid to return to Delhi, Ibn Battuta went to the Maldives, where he served as a judge, married several wives and tried to enforce strict Islamic law. He later visited Sri Lanka, climbing Adam’s Peak, a mountain sacred to several religions, and travelled to Bengal.

He then sailed through Southeast Asia, stopping at the Muslim sultanate of Samudra Pasai in Sumatra, and reached China around 1345 or 1346. He described the great port of Quanzhou, which Arabs called Zaitun, and Guangzhou, and praised Chinese porcelain, paper money and the safety of travel. His claim to have gone on to Beijing is doubted by many historians.

Return home and the Black Death (1346-1349)

Returning west by sea, Ibn Battuta reached Syria in 1348, just as the Black Death was spreading. He described processions of prayer in Damascus as the epidemic killed huge numbers of people, and he learned that his mother had died of the plague in Morocco. He reached Fez in November 1349.

Spain and West Africa (1350-1354)

After a short visit to Granada, the last Muslim kingdom in Spain, he made his final great journey. Early in 1352 he left Sijilmasa in southern Morocco with a caravan across the Sahara, passed the salt mines of Taghaza and reached the Mali Empire, then ruled by Mansa Sulayman, the brother of Mansa Musa. He stayed in Mali for about eight months, visited Timbuktu and Gao and returned to Morocco in early 1354.

The Rihla: writing the journeys down

Back in Fez, the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris ordered that the travels be recorded. Ibn Battuta dictated his memories to the young Andalusian scholar Ibn Juzayy, who polished the text and completed it in December 1355. Its full Arabic title is Tuhfat al-Nuzzar fi Ghara’ib al-Amsar wa ‘Aja’ib al-Asfar, “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling”.

The book follows a literary genre, the rihla, or travel account, popular in North Africa. It describes rulers, scholars, saints, food, dress, marriage customs and trade, and Ibn Battuta’s own opinions on whether people followed Islamic law correctly.

How reliable is it?

The Rihla was composed from memory years after the events, and Ibn Battuta apparently lost his notes when he was robbed in India. Some passages, especially descriptions of Syria and Arabia, were borrowed by Ibn Juzayy from the earlier travel writer Ibn Jubayr. Historians doubt certain episodes, such as a journey to the Volga Bulgars and parts of the travels in China, and the dates do not always fit together. Most of the account, however, is consistent with other sources and is accepted as a genuine first-hand record. Its value lies less in precise dates than in the details only a visitor could know: the price of food in a market, the ceremonies of a royal audience, the way a sultan dispensed justice or how women dressed and moved in public. Even where Ibn Battuta exaggerates his own importance, he offers a rare personal view of how ordinary travellers, merchants and scholars moved through the medieval world.

Key people

• Ibn Battuta (1304–c. 1368/1369): Moroccan legal scholar and traveller.
• Ibn Juzayy (1321–c. 1357): scholar from Granada who wrote down and edited the Rihla.
• Abu Inan Faris: Marinid sultan of Morocco (1348–1358), who commissioned the book.
• Muhammad bin Tughluq: sultan of Delhi (1325–1351), Ibn Battuta’s employer in India.
• Mansa Sulayman: ruler of the Mali Empire, whom Ibn Battuta visited in 1352–1353.

By the numbers

Legacy

After 1355 Ibn Battuta served as a judge in Morocco and died around 1368 or 1369; little is known of his last years. His book circulated in manuscripts in the Muslim world but was unknown in Europe until the 19th century, when French scholars published the Arabic text with a translation (1853–1858). The English translation by H. A. R. Gibb, completed by C. F. Beckingham, appeared between 1958 and 2000.

Today Ibn Battuta is celebrated as one of the greatest travellers of the pre-modern world, often compared with Marco Polo (see Marco Polo in Yuan China). For historians, the Rihla gives unique descriptions of places such as Kilwa, the Maldives and the Mali Empire, for which few other written sources survive. A crater on the Moon and many streets, schools and an airport in Morocco are named after him.

Timeline

• 1304, 24 February: Ibn Battuta is born in Tangier.
• 1325, 14 June: He leaves Tangier for Mecca.
• 1326: Visits Cairo and Damascus and completes his first hajj.
• c. 1330–1331: Sails along the East African coast to Kilwa.
• c. 1334: Arrives in Delhi and enters the service of Muhammad bin Tughluq.
• 1341–1342: The embassy to China ends in shipwreck at Calicut.
• c. 1345–1346: Reaches the ports of southern China.
• 1349, November: Returns to Fez after the Black Death.
• 1352–1353: Crosses the Sahara and visits the Mali Empire.
• 1355, December: The Rihla is completed by Ibn Juzayy.

Why it matters

Ibn Battuta’s travels show how a shared religion, language and law connected a vast part of the medieval world, allowing one scholar to work from Morocco to India. His Rihla preserves vivid eyewitness evidence of societies across three continents at a time when the Black Death and the decline of the Mongol empires were about to change them.