14th century. Mediterranean. After almost three decades, the world traveler was returning to his native land. He had traveled 120,000 kilometers in an area that today comprises more than forty countries. In addition to countless remarkable adventures, an enviable number for one man’s lifetime even by today’s traveling standards, he had acquired many influential positions and titles in distant lands.
He returned home wealthy and respectable. No, it was not Marco Polo, still the most famous medieval traveler in the West. This was Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan from a respected family of Berber origin, who in 1325 – a year after Marco Polo’s death – initially set out from Tangier on a pilgrimage to Mecca. The pilgrimage turned into an endless journey that took him through virtually the entire Muslim world of that time.
Ibn Battuta, not Marco Polo, was the greatest traveler of the pre-modern era, although his achievements and experiences are still overshadowed by those of a far more famous European. He walked, rode and drove over five times as much territory, including the Middle East, the Russian steppes, Anatolia, India, South-East Asia, China, North, East and West Africa. For centuries, no one has come close to his knees. He has known more than sixty rulers, plus many viziers, governors, imams and other dignitaries. But because Ibn Battuta was a Muslim African and Polo a Catholic European, the latter has made his mark on the Eurocentric version of world history.
Ibn Battuta’s journey was certainly much more extensive and his experiences more varied. For a while he traveled with official pilgrim caravans, then alone, and again accompanied by believers and friends, wives and mistresses, and more and more often with slaves and slaves given to him as gifts along the way.
He became a judge, an ascetic, a religious scholar, a rich man, a father, an official of an eccentric Indian sultan, a friend of the wife of a drunken Mongol khan, an ambassador, married and divorced at least ten times, almost lost his life and all his property several times, and successfully avoided before returning home the plague that was then raging most lethally in Eurasia and North Africa.
But Ibn Batuta traveled among ‘his own’, within the social context of Dar al-Islam, where the Muslim population was predominant, while Marco traveled with his uncle and father to lands few Europeans have seen. In this respect, the Venetian was a pioneer and a forerunner of a great age of European exploration and discovery.
Like Marco Polo, Ibn Batuta dictated his adventures to a note-taker and in 1355 a comprehensive travelog, or Rihla (Travels), was written in the then very popular genre of travel literature. Ibn Batut’s Rustichello was the talented Ibn Juzayy, and under his pen was produced a far more vivid and experiential narrative than Marco Polo’s Travels.
It reveals the traveler’s thinking and character traits, interests, prejudices, courage, vanity, even sexual appetite, and the constant desire for friendship or recognition from influential people. He was horrified at any violation of and deviation from the Sharia, especially with regard to what he considered to be too liberal relations between men and women.
Rihla is a blend of autobiography and cultural history of 14th century Islamic civilisation and as such offers a unique insight into the intellectual and spiritual life of Muslims throughout the Dar al-Islam, or ‘House of Islam’.
The inquisitive Ibn Batuta was a keen observer and, as a deeply religious orthodox Muslim with a legal background, he was particularly interested in the implementation of Islamic Sharia law. The book opens a door into the world of the ruling and religious elites in whose circle Ibn Batuta moved.
The economic and cultural ties and the flow of ideas, knowledge and customs between societies thousands of kilometers apart were surprisingly close because they were linked by a common faith. Advanced communication networks existed and Dar al-Islam was the prototype of globalization. The Islam of the 14th century was unifying and cosmopolitan.
Despite such a rich source of knowledge about the Eastern Hemisphere, which was only superficially known to most of the Christian world, it was not until the 19th century that the name Ibn Batuto began to be mentioned in Europe. It was then that two German academics published, independently of each other, translations of passages of the Rihla from manuscripts recovered in the Middle East. As interest in Orientalism grew, Ibn Batut’s masterpiece soon became of interest to the British and the French, who, during the occupation of Algeria, found the complete original manuscripts and began to translate them.
Ibn Batuta did not take notes during his travels, so some of the testimonies and claims are inaccurate and imprecise. Certain events do not correspond chronologically with historical facts, and he describes parts of the route and some places so superficially that he was almost certainly not there. This is particularly true of the area of China and present-day Russia along the Volga.
But it is only a few chapters of the thousand-plus-page Rihla, and although many of his contemporaries accused him of being a liar, his account is now largely proven to be credible and authentic. For example, he mentions more than two thousand people by name in the book, the vast majority of whom have been identified by experts using independent sources. There are surprisingly few errors in the names and dates he gives after 29 years of traveling.
World traveler Ibn Batuta discovered his uncontrollable wanderlust on his first pilgrimage to the Islamic holy site of Mecca. So he set out to fulfill the duty of every Muslim. But then he was driven on by his passion and eagerness to discover new lands and people. He supported himself with the help of many benefactors who generously sustained his life’s mission. One could even say that Ibn Batuta was a professional traveller.
On the way
Little is known about the youth of Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad ibn ‘Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati ibn Batutta (ibn means ‘son of’). He was not an Arab but, like most Moroccans, a Berber. He was a member of the upper middle class, came from a family of lawyers and undoubtedly received a traditional religious upbringing and legal education. His studies earned him the title of qadi, i.e. judge in religious and civil matters.
Tangier, his birthplace, was an international city with an important strategic position at the crossroads of four geographical worlds, European, African, Atlantic and Mediterranean, with a port that was both a haven for warships and an outlet for the growing number of merchant ships. The crossing of Christian ships and merchants from Genoa, Catalonia, Pisa and Marseille with Muslim ones was not unusual in peaceful times, and cosmopolitan religious and cultural coexistence marked Ibn Batut’s upbringing.
Not far away, on the other side of the Strait of Gibraltar, the once thriving Islamic state of Al-Andalus was slowly losing territory under the pressure of the Christian Reconquista and the alliance of the Portuguese, Castilian, Navarrese and Aragonese kings. Both Iberia and the Maghreb were still under the control of the powerful militant Berber dynasty of the Almohads in the 12th century, but they were unable to hold on to a vast empire stretching from the Atlantic to Libya, including Iberia and the Maghreb. It broke up into four kingdoms.
The last outpost of Al-Andalus was the mighty Granada under the Nasrid dynasty, and Morocco was ruled by the Marinids in Ibn Batut’s time. At the edge of the Mediterranean, during periods of war and peace, there was still a rich exchange between Al-Andalus and North Africa, and the young Ibn Batuta was clearly encouraged by the eventful developments.
Tangier was indeed diverse and interesting, but it was not one of the religious centres of learning like, say, Fes, Tunis or Tlemcen. During Ibn Batut’s upbringing, there was not a single madrassa, i.e. secondary or higher theological school, so wealthier boys were taught in mosques or private homes. They spent a great deal of time memorising classical Islamic texts, and the most eminent scholars were those who could recite whole books by heart. In general, memory training was the most important skill, while critical thinking was neither encouraged nor valued.
Grammar, mathematics, rhetoric and a little logic rounded off the education, all of which was crowned by a refinement in fine and polished manners. The rules of decorum, courtesy, discretion, table manners and decent dress and cleanliness were of paramount importance to Ibn Batuta throughout his life, and in his travelogue he often makes astonishing references to violations and disrespect.
In the Maldives, for example, he could not and did not accept the lack of dress of women, whose basic wardrobe was only a cape around the waist. In the Golden Horde, he was horrified by the Khan, who often slumped drunkenly on his throne.
Sharia law, derived from the original religious teachings as preached by the Prophet Muhammad and inseparable from Islam, has been the cornerstone of scholarship. The most widespread at the time was Suni or orthodox Islam, within which there were four schools of law.
Another very important aspect of Ibn Battuta’s faith was Sufism, the mystical and ascetic dimension of Islam, to which he devoted himself on several occasions during his travels. It was then that he withdrew from the everyday life and sought the company of hermits and deeply pious Sufis who aspired to direct contact with Allah. Their rituals were heavily infused with poetry, dance and music. On several occasions, he even thought of renouncing secular life altogether, but his wanderlust was too strong.
Since the Sharia dictated all aspects of social order, it was very similar throughout the Muslim world, and a trained legal professional could navigate it with ease. This, of course, in many ways facilitated Ibn Battuta’s wanderings among sultanates, kingdoms, canats and empires from Spain to China. Travelling was not unusual, but most people travelled for a purpose, most often for trade or pilgrimage.
The pilgrimage to Mecca (or Hajj), the birthplace of Islam’s founder Muhammad, is one of the five pillars of Islam and the duty of every Muslim who can afford it and is not ill or otherwise incapacitated.
When the twenty-one year old Ibn Batuta decided to make the pilgrimage to the Holy City in 1325, he was just one of thousands set out on this long and gruelling journey, often fraught with danger, but crowned with a triumph of happiness and triumph. For scholarly divine travellers like Ibn Batuta in particular, the pilgrimage was also a path of study, and they used the opportunity to visit mosques and madrasas, meet eminent religious scholars and deepen their knowledge.
During the pilgrimage season, most pilgrims joined well-organised official caravans that followed the traditional caravan route, picking up new pilgrims at predetermined stopping points. Some were on foot, others on horseback, mules, camels, alone or with their families, young and old, rich with many companions or poor, subsisting on alms, experienced and novice travellers.
The journey brought together Muslims from the Afro-Eurasian world and internationalised Islam. Muslim rulers were the patrons of the largest processions, and they provided military protection against bandits, medical care, general supplies, food, religious rituals, trade and even the settlement of legal matters.
Ibn Batuta, too, had intended to make the pilgrimage as part of such a caravan when he parted from his homeland.
Through Egypt to Mecca
It took him a year and a half to reach Mecca for the first time, during which time he travelled through North Africa, Egypt, Palestine and Syria. In Tunis, he enthusiastically visited and even lived in madrasas, as was customary for travelling scholars.
He soon received the first of many honours, being appointed qadi of the caravan and put in charge of resolving various disputes. The first problems and complications began when Ibn Batuta fell seriously ill, as he did many times later, due to exertion. But as this was while crossing into hostile territory, he was afraid of marauders and had himself tied to a saddle rather than be captured.
While crossing into Libya, he married for the first time, to a Tunisian official’s companion and daughter. From then on, he changed wives and mistresses like shirts, and even his first marriage was short-lived. A Muslim can have four wives at once, so he often divorced when he wanted new wives.
We learn very little from Rihla about his intimate world, as it is not proper for Muslims to speak publicly about their privacy. But apart from his regular indulgence in female charms and politically motivated marriages, women were only of secondary importance to him. Of all the wives mentioned in the records, only one was worthy of being mentioned by name.
Arriving in Egypt, a new world opened up for the young man. Egypt thrived under the Mamelukes, who earned the loyalty of the local population by successfully defending themselves against the ferocious Mongols, the bloodthirsty Central Asian steppe nomads responsible for the devastation of the Middle East and much of Asia in the 12th and 13th centuries.
The Mamelukes were a true medieval phenomenon. As formerly enslaved soldiers and of a different ethnic origin to the Egyptians, they successfully swept to power in Egypt and Palestine after converting to Islam.
Despite their heavy-handed rule, Egypt flourished under their effective political system and social organisation, and they established effective cooperation with domestic elites. Even the best organised pilgrim caravans travelled under the Mameluke banner, providing them with even more prestige and visibility.
Ibn Batuta was first taken by Alexandria, with its mighty ancient Alexandrian lighthouse on the island of Faros at the western end of the Nile Delta. On the bustling trade route – the spice route – between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the city flourished with two ports, one Muslim and the other Christian.
But as a committed Islamic scholar, he was driven to Cairo, the enlightened and progressive main intellectual and cultural centre of Dar al-Islam. He left the main caravan and went his own way. Cairo was huge by medieval standards and, with a population of more than half a million, fifteen times the size of London. After the destruction of Baghdad and Damascus, all who could afford it took refuge from the Mongols, bringing with them wealth, knowledge and skills.
Ibn Batuta was blinded. In front of him was the world’s largest bazaar and an almost nerve-wracking hustle and bustle, with more than thirty markets for different crafts, thirty mosques and endless infrastructure projects. But what impressed him most was the Maristan Hospital, a charitable institution where all patients, rich and poor, were treated free of charge and to standards comparable to those of today. The rooms were clean, there was a library, baths and prayer halls, and music was used to ease the pain.
He spent a lot of time in the company of Cairo’s elites and Sufis, and when one of them told him that his journey would take him to India, he began to toy with the idea of a longer journey. For a Muslim of Ibn Batut’s origin and education, financing such a journey was a minor concern. He quickly began to support himself on the rich gifts of benefactors.
Almsgiving is one of the pillars of Islam and a duty that dictates that devout believers help others – not only the poor, the orphans, the slaves, the fighters in the holy war, but also the travellers. Ibn Batuta was a distinguished and respected traveller, and the gifts he received regularly for nearly thirty years were fitting!
From Egypt, he followed the royal road to Damascus, a beautiful and exotic oasis, a kind of second capital of the Mameluke Sultanate, not far from the border with the Mongol Empire and therefore under the protection of the Sultan’s mighty army. The Mamelukes had successfully expelled the Mongols from Damascus not long before Ibn Batut’s arrival, and had strongly encouraged the trade in luxury goods between Egypt and Syria, as the proceeds filled their coffers.
There, he intended to join the caravan again. But it was clearly moving too slowly for the impatient Ibn Batuta, so he left it again in Gaza and headed for Jerusalem, the third Muslim holy city after Mecca and Medina. Pilgrims from all three monotheistic religions have been making the hilly Palestinian pilgrimage route since the end of the Crusades, as Jerusalem is the Holy City for Jews, Christians and Muslims. While the territory belonged to the latter, pilgrims of other faiths were guaranteed safe passage and protection.
Jerusalem was then only a small provincial city of tens of thousands of inhabitants, but it had endless holy places, tombs, altars and shrines. For Muslims, of course, the most sacred is the Temple Mount, with its Magnificent Shrine, or Dome of the Rock, within which is the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
As the time for the pilgrimage drew near, Ibn Batuta returned to Damascus and, in its eighth-century Grand Mosque, “the most magnificent mosque in the world…, the most perfect in architecture and the most refined in beauty”, devoted himself for the first time to serious study with renowned theologians in anticipation of the Hajj.
But studying didn’t seem to take him long enough to avoid getting married again and, of course, divorced. Years later, he found out that his ex-wife had given birth to a son, who had died when he was 10 years old.
Mecca, Persia and Iraq
Damascus was the main gathering point for pilgrims and, as in every pilgrimage season, thousands of people slowly gathered there. Some authors estimate that in years of political stability and favourable weather conditions, as early as the Middle Ages, as many as twenty thousand people would have flocked there. The Mamelukes even set up charity funds for the poorest of the poor, while everyone else carried most of the things they needed on the road. Ibn Batuta got out of his financial difficulties with the help of a generous scholar, with whom he stayed when he fell ill again.
From Damascus, the road first went to Medina, where Mohammed founded the first Muslim state and died in 632. While a visit to Medina is not compulsory, the vast majority of pilgrims still pay their respects at the tomb of the Prophet.
The last leg of the journey between Medina and Mecca is something extraordinary for the average Muslim, as he approaches the fulfilment of his greatest hopes and dreams. Exhausted travellers shed their worn-out worldly clothes and change into special ceremonial white robes, symbolising equality before God, and enter a sanctified state called ihram.
In Mecca, Islam’s holiest site, the first step is to the Grand Mosque, in the centre of which stands a 15-metre-high black stone cube, the Kaba Shrine. There, worshippers perform a tawaf, or circumambulation, during which each person must walk around it seven times in a counter-clockwise direction while reciting special prayers. The original Kaba is said to have been built out of wood by the Prophet Abraham (Ibrahim to Muslims) as the first shrine to the worship of a single God, Allah.
The Kaba plays a central role in Islam, as it embodies the uniqueness of God, which is why all Muslims turn towards it, the Kibla, during prayer. Embedded in the outer south-eastern face of the Kaba is a sacred black stone of meteoric origin, said to have been placed there by Abraham and Ishmael as a symbol of God’s covenant with them and, by extension, with the Muslim community. Every pilgrim seeks to kiss the stone, as Muhammad is said to have done, or at least to touch it.
The next part of the ceremony was a pilgrimage to Mount Arafat, or the Mount of Mercy, some 20 kilometres away, where Mohammed is said to have delivered his last sermon. Ibn Batuta spent the night in prayer, and the next day all the worshippers sacrificed a goat or a sheep to commemorate Abraham’s ordeal.
After the last day of Hajj, which was marked by a great feast in Mecca, Ibn Battuta earned the honorific title of Haji – one who had successfully completed the pilgrimage to Mecca.
In addition to fulfilling his basic religious mission, this was an important turning point in his career as a traveller, as he finally decided not to return to Morocco. He set off across the Great Arabian Desert to Mesopotamia to see the lands and cities most marked by the Arab Golden Age, the period before the Mongol invasions and occupation. This time he joined the official Persian caravan and, with the help of a new benefactor, travelled in the greatest comfort, even being able to afford a camel and a packhorse.
Among his many adventures, he described most vividly the ritual of some Sufis in whose company he spent his time: ‘They prepared plenty of kindling and finely chopped wood and lit a fire, then went dancing among the flames, some rolling on the fire, others holding the fire in their mouths until it was completely extinguished …’. Some took a big snake and bit its head until it was completely bitten off.”
When Ibn Batuta set foot on the soil of Persia and Iraq, less than a hundred years had passed since the Mongols had sown death and devastated once great historic cities. The mass extermination was so widespread that the population is said to have fallen from two and a half million to 250,000. But after 1260, the Mongols realised that slaughter would not secure the loyalty of the local population, so they quickly set about rebuilding cities, restoring trade and agriculture, and becoming patrons of culture and the arts.
But above all, their conversion to Islam was decisive. By Ibn Battuta’s time, the Mongols were living more peacefully with the Persians, and refugees and exiles were slowly returning. Just as it appeared at the beginning that the Mongols would destroy Islamic civilisation, over the years they have in fact taken it over and actively encouraged it.
On the way to Baghdad, Shiraz stuck out in his mind as one of the most attractive cities. “Even its inhabitants are handsome in stature and cleanly dressed. Only Shiraz comes close to Damascus in the beauty of its bazaars, rivers and fruit groves,” Ibn Batuta enthused.
In Baghdad, which attracted him because of its illustrious past as the former capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, he again found just one of many unexpected opportunities. The Mongol ruler or Ilkhan Abu Said, a descendant of Genghis Khan and ruler of one of the four Mongol kingdoms that succeeded Genghis Khan’s empire, was in Baghdad.
The Ilkhan was heading north and Ibn Batuta was given the opportunity to join the travelling court for a while. During his audience with the Ilkhan, the Ilkhan took an open interest in the traveller’s adventures and lavished him with gifts. Ibn Batuta appreciated him as few rulers do. He found him handsome, but above all he was very pious and did not drink alcohol, so he bore little resemblance to his ‘barbarian’ ancestors.
Ibn Batuta has travelled some 6,500 kilometres so far. In addition to North Africa, Palestine and Syria, he has crossed the Zagros mountains four times, the Arabian desert twice, and visited most of the cities of Iraq and western Persia. He was tired. He decided to make another hajj to Mecca, but fell so ill that he had to perform the tawaf on horseback. He then rested for a long time in Mecca and lived a quiet, pious life in the shadow of the walls of the Great Mosque. He attended daily lectures and subsisted on alms from the qadi of Mecca itself.
Here is the first chronological inconsistency in his account, and it is not entirely clear whether he was in Mecca for one year or three. Hence the use of two years in describing his travels.
East Africa, Anatolia and Constantinople
Slowly, his desire to visit India was growing, as he had heard that prominent foreigners were very welcome there, occupying important positions in the court of the Sultan of India and in government departments. He left Mecca and headed for Yemen, from where it was easiest to reach India.
The fastest route to Yemen was the Red Sea, but Ibn Batut’s first maritime experience did not impress him. Apart from being one of the most dangerous and unforgiving seas, with its rough currents, desert storms, coral reefs and pirates, the Red Sea did not inspire him with confidence, nor did the ships he saw in the harbours. These were not the sturdy vessels of the Mediterranean, but small dhow-type sailboats with thin hulls made of planks lashed together with ropes to help them navigate the rocky shoals.
People were packed like animals on them, and Ibn Batuta set off for Aden in one of them. When strong winds caused her to veer off course and waves began to crash dangerously on board, the terrified passengers preferred to continue their journey overland.
But from there, as so many times before and so many times after, the traveller headed in the wrong direction, instead of towards India, he was carried towards Africa, as far as Kilwa in present-day Tanzania, the last Muslim outpost on the east coast of Africa.
The whole area around the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean between Africa and India was then marked by Muslim trade routes. The most flourishing trade was in ivory, gold, animal skins, frankincense and, of course, slaves. Ibn Batuta’s accounts also include several references to his slaves, which he regularly received as gifts, and he often bought young slave girls himself. These were, of course, his mistresses.
On his busy itinerary, he visited ports such as Christian Zeila in Ethiopia, with a large Muslim community, but which was “the dirtiest, most unpleasant and smelly place in the world. The reason for the stench was the large amount of fish and the blood of camels, which were slaughtered in the streets.”
In Mogadishu, the most enterprising and wealthy city on this part of the coast, he was again received with full honours and an extravagant feast. He described it in detail – meat, fish, vegetables with rice, poured with butter, local specialities, unripe bananas in fresh milk, sour milk, green ginger, mango, pickled lemons and chilli.
“One person eats as much as the whole gang, so they are corpulent and extremely fat,” he added, unenthusiastically. But he was also overwhelmed by the richness of the place. In Kilwa, they lived in multi-storey stone houses with plumbing, wore silk clothes and lots of gold and silver jewellery, ate out of china and prayed in magnificent mosques. He described approvingly the pious and generous rulers who shared meals with the poor and lavished gifts on travellers like him.
After returning to the Arabian Peninsula, he and a friend wanted to visit Oman, but a hired guide was about to rob and murder them. They narrowly escaped and, hungry, thirsty and with tired legs, made it to the village with a last effort. Ibn Batuta was again drawn to Mecca, and around 1330 (or 1332) he was there for a third time, the sanctity of the place apparently giving him both physical and mental rest. He gathered enough strength to set off for India and again, through many byways, he was drawn in the opposite direction, this time by sea to the south of Anatolia (now Turkey).
He travelled from Syria across the Mediterranean on a boat from Genoa and wrote that he was treated very honourably by the Christians, who did not even charge him for the journey. The Turks settled in Anatolia after the conquering march of the Great Seljuks in the 11th century, beginning the long transformation of Asia Minor from Greek and Armenian to Turkish.
At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit, Turkey was a collection of small and insignificant sultanates after the decline of the Seljuks, but the rise of the Ottomans under the mighty Ottoman was imminent.
He spent two years in Anatolia, all the time accompanied by his first true travelling companion. Despite the culture shock of being Turkish, he wrote that the journey was quite easy. The Turks had built comfortable stopping places along the main routes. The so-called khans were both taverns and lodgings, with smaller mosques, baths, courtyards and covered halls, and the police were there to keep them safe.
He was enchanted by the country, probably because he was received with great honours everywhere. The local grandees competed with each other in showing hospitality. He visited some twenty princes at court and amassed a vast fortune. He was showered not only with money, horses and lavish clothes, but also with slaves and servants. Dancing and whirling in a trance in Sufi brotherhoods was very popular in Turkey and Ibn Batuta often attended such rituals of approaching God.
The people were attractive and friendly, their clothes clean and the food excellent. The different religious communities coexisted in harmony and mutual respect, but separately, with Christian, Orthodox, Jewish and Muslim neighbourhoods. The only thorn in the side, in his view, was the over-representation of women in society. He was scathing: “When a Turkish woman comes to the bazaar, exquisitely dressed and uncovered, in the company of her husband, one would say that he is her servant.”
Women had a very similar place in society on the other side of the Black Sea, in the vast territory of the Mongol Golden Horde (a large part of Eastern Europe and Russia), one of the four successors to the Genghis Khan Empire and the next destination of the society.
After a near-fatal sea crossing, they set off north along the Volga River for more than a thousand kilometres under the protection of the local Uzbeg Khan. When the khan welcomed a visitor in the middle of his huge gold-covered tent, his four wives sat next to him. Not only did they not hide, they participated openly in public affairs and politics. Princesses had similar rights to their brothers, and the wives of the rulers, called khatun, made important decisions independently, and in public the husband, the khan, always treated them with respect and favoured them.
Ibn Batuta himself met many of the khatun who listened to his stories with interest. One of them was the pregnant daughter of the Byzantine Emperor, and when she received her husband’s permission to visit her father’s court and swaddle the baby there, Ibn Batuta immediately asked to accompany her.
He was part of an official expedition, but he had never experienced anything like it. The expedition consisted of 5000 horsemen, 500 soldiers and servants, 200 slaves, 20 Greek and Indian spiders, 400 wagons, 2000 horses, 500 oxen and camels. The unfortunate places the procession wound its way past for 75 days were almost impoverished when it had to be fed and cared for.
This part of the journey ended with a visit to Constantinople, where he was a guest at the court of Andronicus III. He was a guest of Andronikos Paleologos, the father of the pregnant princess. He saw everything there was to see and was accompanied by fanfare at every turn. He refused to enter the Hagia Sophia, which was then used as a basilica, because he would have had to bow before the cross. But Constantinople had already lost most of its former splendor and grandeur.
Ibn Batuta was once again gripped by Indian fever and this time he really set off for this exotic land. True to his promise to avoid the roads he already knew and his resolve to visit all the great cities of Islam, he found himself on the beautiful Silk Road. After four months of crossing the Chagatai Canyon, another of the four successor states of the original Mongol empire, where the majority of the population was nomadic, he finally approached India via Afghanistan.
India and Maldives
Now he was a man of considerable means, a large entourage and a high reputation. Among others, he had at least three young women with him, one of whom gave birth to a baby girl, who died shortly after her arrival in India.
At the beginning, everything went as planned. Sultan Mohamed Tughluq lived up to his reputation as an employer of foreigners and indeed offered Ibn Batuti a job immediately. This was the first time he had an official job, with the exception of a very brief stint as a qadi of the caravan on its first journey to Mecca. He was given a comfortable house, servants and, before he took up his post, a large honorarium and the assurance of a regular salary equivalent to the income and taxes of two villages!
Despite having little experience as a lawyer and only a superficial knowledge of Persian, the language in use, he was appointed one of Delhi’s qadis.
Muslims were a small minority of the population, but they were the ruling elite and lived accordingly. Even the once modest and moderate Ibn Batuta lived large and became accustomed to comfort and luxury. He was known for his extravagance and even ran up debts when he renovated his house and built a small mosque next door.
Like the Mamelukes in Egypt, the Muslim military elite secured authority over the Hindu castes by defending the Indian subcontinent from the Mongols. But because Hindus spoke Hindustani, there was a language barrier between the two classes. Even more problematic for good relations was the Sultan himself.
Not only did he have many unrealistic and megalomaniacal plans – including, for example, ordering the relocation of the capital – most of which had disastrous consequences, he was also a very brutal ruler. “Every day hundreds of them are brought to the great reception hall, chained and shackled, and those who are to be executed are executed, others tortured, others beaten,” Ibn Batuta reported. Bodies lay outside the palace gates for days.
The Sultan could not stand criticism and the subjects paid for even the slightest perceived disloyalty with their heads. The punishments were unimaginably bestial, and in addition to the ‘traditional’ chopping in half and skinning, he was very fond of throwing the convicts to elephants with swords attached to their tusks. The knives were thrown into the air, massacring the animals and finally trampling them. Discontent spread and rebellions broke out all over the kingdom.
The atmosphere at court was paranoid, although the Sultan rewarded his loyal followers handsomely. But the suspicious ruler changed his mind about them from day to day, throwing the lucky ones behind bars and leaving many for dead.
Ibn Batuta also fell out of favor because he befriended a prominent but disobedient Sufi and married a woman from a rebellious family. In a cold sweat, he expected the worst, but was unexpectedly released. Deeply shaken, he lived for months in a cave on the outskirts of Delhi in spiritual retreat, abject poverty and self-denial. He learned to fast for forty days.
To get rid of the Sultan and the contract that bound him to him, he decided to go on hajj, which the Sultan should not have forbidden him to do. But the unpredictable Mohammed surprised him with a much more attractive proposal, offering him a diplomatic mission to China.
Ibn Batuta thus became the Sultan’s official envoy, and had to oversee a whole caravan of gifts for the Chinese Emperor, including 200 Hindu slaves, singers and dancers, 15 paijas, 100 horses, and assorted goods, utensils, clothes, weapons.
But the procession immediately ran into problems. They were repeatedly attacked by Hindu rebels and even imprisoned Ibn Batuta in a cave with the intention of executing him. Again, miraculously, he was saved and even managed to rejoin the expedition.
He was enchanted by the rich Indian Ocean province of Gujarat, which reminded him of the Arab world. From there they were heading for China by boat, and Ibn Batuti was relieved to see the big, sturdy Chinese junks with inner cabins and was looking forward to a comfortable voyage.
But it was not to be, as the ships loaded with luggage and gifts sank in a severe storm the day before departure. All the gifts for the Chinese Emperor were lost and Ibn Batuta, fearing the Sultan’s wrath, dared not return to Delhi. The year was 1341 and he spent eight years in India.
He has lost another lover and another child, and has no choice but to get distracted by a new goal. He planned to see China on his own, with stops in the Maldives and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on the way. As he approached the Maldives, a paradise island with tall coconut palms, no more than a meter above sea level and no real cities, he was enchanted.
There, against his will, he again became a qadi. He tried to hide his identity, but he was recognised and the ruling elite was very honored to host such a distinguished visitor. As a qadi, he was very strict about Sharia, introducing reforms, imposing heavier penalties than his predecessors for disobeying the law, and proudly saying, “The vizier and the islanders feared me.”
He married into a powerful family and became a local bigwig. He succumbed to vanity and enjoyed luxury again. He even had political ambitions, but was soon accused of being part of a conspiracy. He resentfully packed his bags, divorced one wife and took three with him. But he quickly got rid of them too and sent them back.
Crossing China to home
Heading for China, he stopped in Ceylon to see the famous Adam’s Peak, a sacred mountain for Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists. It is where Adam is said to have fallen after his expulsion from heaven, left his footprint on a rock and repented for a thousand years before he and Eve became the progenitors of the human race.
Ibn Batuta was richly endowed by the ruler of Ceylon, but lost it all in a shipwreck on his way back to the Maldives. There he learned that she had a son and tried to take him away from his desperate mother, as Sharia law required. In the end, he took pity on his hysterical ex-wife, let her have her son and this time really went to China. His route took him across the Bay of Bengal, past Chittagong in Bangladesh, Malaysia and Sumatra.
The part of the Rihla describing Ibn Battuta’s journey through China is the most controversial and dubious. Chronological information is scant, descriptions of places and people are confusing and generalized, and details are almost non-existent compared to other chapters. Considering how much territory the author is said to have traveled there, he devotes suspiciously little space to it in the travelog.
It is thought to have arrived on its shores during the last peaceful years of the reign of the Mongol ruler, the last of the four successors of Genghis Khan. The Yuan dynasty was the only one of the four not to convert to Islam but to adopt Confucian ideology. It supported an open policy of recruitment and trade with foreigners, which is why there were many foreign settlements along the Chinese coast, including Muslim communities.
Ibn Batuta praised China as very safe for foreigners, but admitted that he had experienced the greatest culture shock in China. For him, the Chinese were godless and he did not understand most of their customs. Hangzhou was the biggest city he had ever seen, and indeed it was probably the biggest city in the world at that time. The description of the journey to Beijing and back is so bizarre that it is most likely fictitious or copied.
In 1346, Ibn Batuta was finally on his way home again. Three years later, he was on the streets of Tangier recounting his incredible adventures. His return was most marked by one of the worst catastrophes of the 14th century, the plague or Black Death. The traveler successfully evaded it, but he was an eyewitness to the devastation it wreaked. People fled from it in droves, and so it was spread far and wide.
Cairo’s population has dropped from half a million to 200,000 and life has come to a standstill. This saddened Ibn Batuta, because Cairo was no longer the city he had been excited to discover so many years ago. Under these circumstances, he nevertheless performed Hajj once more, for the last time. In the meantime, he learned that his father had died fifteen years earlier and his mother had succumbed to the plague only a few months earlier. He returned to Morocco in 1349, aged 45.
But he found no peace. He had two more important Muslim outposts to see. First, he went to Granada and even answered a call for volunteers from the Moroccan army to defend Gibraltar against the Christians. He was not at all impressed by the magnificent Alhambra – it was probably very mediocre compared to all the palaces and courts he had seen. But it was there that he met the young man of letters, Ibn Juzayya, the very man who later wrote and designed the Rihla as we know it today, on the Sultan’s instructions.
The last outpost was Mali, a rich kingdom in West Africa, ruled at the time by Mansa (King) Suleiman, brother of the much more famous Mansa Musa. Musa caused a sensation in Cairo in 1324 when he appeared there with a hundred camels loaded with gold and an entourage of thousands on a pilgrimage to Mecca.
Ibn Batuta spent eight months in Mali, falling seriously ill in between. He was generally not enthusiastic about this part of the journey, the Sultan was not generous enough, women walked around naked and cannibalism was said to be common and accepted among some tribes.
He returned to Fes in 1354 and he and Ibn Juzayy spent two years working on Rihla. The rest of Ibn Batut’s life passed without incident comparable to that of the previous thirty years. He retired to a judgeship in a provincial town, probably remarried and died around 1368.
Through a combination of desire, endurance, perseverance and luck, he proved that human life is long enough to achieve even the most unlikely and unusual goals.
