A Pilgrimage That Became a Lifetime
Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304, into a family of Islamic legal scholars. His name has an unexpected meaning: Ibn Battuta literally means son of a duckling.
In June 1325, at the age of 21, he set out alone to perform the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. The journey would normally take about sixteen months. He would not return to Morocco for 24 years.
He later wrote that he left home as birds leave their nests, sad to part from his parents but driven by a powerful longing to see the holy places.
He followed the North African coast to Alexandria, a journey of more than 3,500 kilometres, then went on to Cairo and Damascus. After completing his first pilgrimage in Mecca, he decided not to go home. He kept travelling instead.
Over about 30 years he visited much of Africa, Asia and the Iberian Peninsula, covering around 117,000 kilometres. That is more than any other explorer before modern times, and nearly five times the distance Marco Polo travelled.
A Judge in Delhi and the Maldives
His learning opened doors. In India, the sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq, said at the time to be the richest man in the Muslim world, made him a qadi, a judge.
It was not an easy job. The sultan was unpredictable, and for six years Ibn Battuta swung between living in luxury and falling under suspicion. His chance to leave finally came in 1341, when the sultan put him in charge of an official mission to China.
The mission went badly wrong. On the way to the coast, he was robbed, kidnapped and nearly killed. Then a storm sank one of the expedition's ships, and the other sailed off without him.
Afraid to go back to Delhi as a failure, he eventually made his way to the Maldives, planning only a short stay. The islands' leaders wanted a chief judge who knew Arabic and the Qur'an, so they gave him gifts and made it hard for him to leave by ship. He stayed nine months and became chief judge.
From China to Timbuktu
Ibn Battuta reached China in 1345, landing at the port of Quanzhou. He praised Chinese silk, porcelain and paper money, and was amazed by the painted wooden ships crowding the canals of Hangzhou, which he called one of the largest cities he had ever seen.
On his way home, he found the world gripped by the Black Death. In Damascus in 1348, he heard that 2,400 people were dying each day. He also learned that his father had died 15 years earlier. When he finally reached home in 1349, he discovered that his mother had died a few months before.
Still, he was not done. In 1352 he crossed the Sahara with a camel caravan, passing through Taghaza, a town where the buildings were made from slabs of salt. He reached the Mali Empire and travelled on to Timbuktu.
On this journey he saw his first hippopotamus, and he wrote the earliest known description of the bala, a West African instrument made from reeds and gourds.
The Book He Dictated From Memory
After returning home in 1354, Ibn Battuta was asked by the ruler of Morocco to share his story. He dictated it to a scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The result is known as the Rihla, meaning The Travels.
It is the only source for his adventures, and there is a catch. There is no sign he kept notes during nearly three decades on the road, so he had to rely on memory. Parts of the book were also copied from earlier travellers, including a description of Damascus written more than 150 years before.
Modern scholars doubt that he visited every place he described, and some question whether he really reached China. Even so, the Rihla remains an important picture of much of the 14th-century world.
Some of it has been backed up. In 2010, a researcher reported manuscripts of Islamic law at Al-Azhar University in Cairo that Ibn Battuta had copied in Damascus in 1326, matching the date in his book. He spent his final years as a judge in Morocco and died in 1368 or 1369.
