Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta a Moroccan Muslim jurist and traveller of the fourteenth century (1304-1368 or 1369), whose journeys across Africa, Asia and the Islamic world covered some 120,000 kilometres and produced one of the most celebrated travel accounts of the pre-modern era. He served as a judge in Delhi, visited China, and recorded his observations in the Rihla.

Origins and Setting Out

Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta was born in Tangier on the northern coast of Morocco in 1304, into a family of Berber descent whose men were trained as judges and scholars of Islamic law. He received a traditional education in the Maliki school of jurisprudence, whose learning he would later put to use as a magistrate in several distant lands.

In 1325, at the age of twenty-one, he set out on the pilgrimage to Mecca. This journey, the hajj, was a duty of his faith and the beginning of an odyssey that was to last almost thirty years. Rather than return home after the pilgrimage, he resolved to travel as far as he could through the lands of Islam, moving from North Africa through Egypt and Syria to the holy cities of Arabia.

He supported himself along the way by his legal learning, attaching himself to scholars, governors and sultans who valued a trained jurist. His status as a man of religion opened doors everywhere, and his account shows how the shared institutions of Islamic law and scholarship created a network across which a poor pilgrim could travel from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

Through Asia to India and China

After years in Mecca and Persia, Ibn Battuta travelled to Anatolia, the Black Sea and the Golden Horde on the steppe, and thence across Central Asia to India. In 1333 he reached Delhi, where the sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, famed for his learning and his cruelty, appointed him a judge of the Maliki school and granted him a generous salary.

He spent several years at the Delhi court, a period of wealth and danger, before being chosen to lead an embassy to China. His mission collapsed in shipwreck and he was stranded in southern India and the Maldives, where he again served as a judge and married into local families. He continued through Ceylon and Bengal and eventually reached the coast of China, visiting cities such as Quanzhou and Hangzhou.

His descriptions of the lands he passed through record markets, mosques, courts, customs and crops, and they preserve much about trade routes and the interchange of goods among the medieval world's great civilisations. He was an observant reporter, attentive to the practical life of the societies he encountered, though he was occasionally credulous about marvels told to him.

The Return and the Rihla

Ibn Battuta returned westward in the 1340s, passing again through India and Arabia and making a second pilgrimage to Mecca. He then travelled to Syria, Egypt and Tunis, and finally, around 1349, back to Morocco after an absence of nearly a quarter of a century. His parents had both died during his long absence, and he settled for a time in Fez.

He was not yet finished with travelling: he journeyed to Muslim Spain and then crossed the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali, giving one of the few eyewitness accounts of medieval West Africa and its gold trade. It was after his final return that, at the request of the Marinid sultan, he dictated the story of his voyages to a young scholar named Ibn Juzayy.

The resulting book, known as the Rihla, or Travels, was completed around 1355. It is written in elegant Arabic prose and combines autobiography, geography, ethnography and legal observation. Although some episodes have been questioned, later scholarship has confirmed many of its details and used it as a source for the history of the fourteenth-century Islamic world.

The World of the Rihla

The Rihla offers a panoramic view of a world connected by Islam. Ibn Battuta describes the pilgrimage caravans, the merchant ships of the Indian Ocean trade, the slave markets and the courts of sultans, and the varied customs of the peoples he met. He records the generosity of the poor, the strictness of rulers, the treatment of women in different societies, and the abundance of foods and fruits in foreign lands.

Because he travelled with the eyes of a jurist, his book is also a record of legal practice and of how far the law of Islam was observed or adapted across diverse regions. He observes the differences among the schools of law, notes the education of girls in some places, and comments on the standards of justice in distant kingdoms.

Its value lies in its breadth and in its personal voice, for it is one of the very few medieval accounts of the eastern world written by a traveller who actually went there, rather than by a geographer compiling the reports of others. It remains a principal source for the social history of the fourteenth-century world.

Influence and Reputation

The Rihla circulated widely within the Islamic world and was used by later geographers and historians, though it was largely unknown in Europe until the nineteenth century, when scholars translated and studied it. Its publication opened an astonishing window on the medieval East for European readers.

Its journeys have made Ibn Battuta a symbol of a cosmopolitan age of travel before modern frontiers. His account is quoted by historians of trade, of cities and of religion, and it offers one of the fullest surviving pictures of the pilgrim routes and merchant networks that linked Morocco, Arabia, India and China.

He is remembered as the greatest traveller of the medieval world, and his Rihla has been placed beside the narratives of other long-distance voyagers of different civilisations. He died in Morocco, probably in 1368 or 1369, leaving a book that has made him known across the world he had spent his life exploring.

See also

• Rihla
• Delhi Sultanate
• Hajj
• Mali Empire