Over a period of thirty years, Ibn Battuta visited most of the Old World, including Central Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, China, and the Iberian Peninsula. Near the end of his life, he dictated an account of his journeys, titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling, but commonly known as The Rihla.
All that is known about Ibn Battuta's life comes from the autobiographical information included in the account of his travels, which records that he was of Berber descent, born into a family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, known as qadis in the Muslim tradition, Morocco, on 24 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty. His family belonged to a Berber tribe known as the Lawata. As a young man, he would have studied at a Sunni Maliki madh'hab (Islamic jurisprudence school), the dominant form of education in North Africa at that time. Maliki Muslims requested Ibn Battuta serve as their religious judge as he was from an area where it was practised.
Europeans are sometimes puzzled by Arabic/Islamic naming conventions, which mostly don't include a given, middle, or family name. Instead they tend to have a potentially lengthy series of epithetic, aspirational, and/or patronymic names.
In this case, Ibn Battuta simply means son of Battuta...but this may have just been a nickname, because battuta means duckling. His most common full name is given as Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta, which simply means Father of Abdullah, Praiseworthy son of Battuta. But many authoritative texts will go on longer, adding more of his acquired name sequence. In his travelogue, the Rihla, he gives his full name as Shams al-Din Abu’Abdallah Muhammad ibn’Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim ibn Muhammad ibn Yusuf al-Lawati al-Tanji ibn Battuta.
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In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would ordinarily take sixteen months. He was eager to learn more about far-away lands and craved adventure. No one knew that he would not return to Morocco again for twenty-four years. Little did he know that this journey would be perhaps the most epic adventure in history.
On 17 November 1326, following a month spent in Mecca, Ibn Battuta joined a large caravan of pilgrims returning to Iraq across the Arabian Peninsula. The group headed north to Medina and then, travelling at night, turned northeast across the Najd plateau to Najaf, on a journey that lasted about two weeks. In Najaf, he visited the mausoleum of Ali, the Fourth Caliph.
From Aden, Ibn Battuta embarked on a ship heading for Zeila on the coast of Somalia. He then moved on to Cape Guardafui further down the Somalia seaboard, spending about a week in each location.
Ibn Battuta continued by ship south to the Swahili Coast, a region then known in Arabic as the Bilad al-Zanj, with an overnight stop at the island town of Mombasa. Although relatively small at the time, Mombasa would become important in the following century. After a journey along the coast, Ibn Battuta next arrived in the island town of Kilwa in present-day Tanzania, which had become an important transit centre of the gold trade. He described the city as one of the finest and most beautifully built towns; all the buildings are of wood, and the houses are roofed with dīs reeds.
After his third pilgrimage to Mecca, Ibn Battuta decided to seek employment with the Muslim Sultan of Delhi, Muhammad bin Tughluq. In the autumn of 1330 or 1332, he set off for the Seljuk controlled territory of Anatolia with the intention of taking an overland route to India. He crossed the Red Sea and the Eastern Desert to reach the Nile valley and then headed north to Cairo. From there he crossed the Sinai Peninsula to Palestine and then travelled north again through some of the towns that he had visited in 1326. From the Syrian port of Latakia, a Genoese ship took him and his companions to Alanya on the southern coast of modern-day Turkey.
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From Sinope he took a sea route to the Crimean Peninsula, arriving in the Golden Horde realm. He went to the port town of Azov, where he met with the emir of the Khan, then to the large and rich city of Majar. He left Majar to meet with Uzbeg Khan's travelling court (Orda), which was at the time near Beshtau mountain. From there he made a journey to Bolghar, which became the northernmost point he reached, and noted its unusually short nights in summer by the standards of the subtropics. Then he returned to the Khan's court and with it moved to Astrakhan.
In 1345, Ibn Battuta travelled on to Samudra Pasai Sultanate in present-day Aceh, Northern Sumatra, where he notes in his travel log that the ruler of Samudra Pasai was a pious Muslim named Sultan Al-Malik Al-Zahir Jamal-ad-Din, who performed his religious duties with utmost zeal and often waged campaigns against animists in the region. The island of Sumatra, according to Ibn Battuta, was rich in camphor, areca nut, cloves, and tin.
In the year 1345 Ibn Battuta arrived at Quanzhou in China's Fujian province, then under the rule of the Mongols. One of the first things he noted was that Muslims referred to the city as Zaitun, but Ibn Battuta
could not find any olives anywhere. He mentioned local artists and
their mastery in making portraits of newly arrived foreigners; these
were for security purposes. Ibn Battuta praised the craftsmen and
their silk and porcelain; as well as fruits such as plums and
watermelons and the advantages of paper money.
After returning to Quanzhou in 1346, Ibn Battuta began his journey back to Morocco.
In Kozhikode, he once again considered throwing himself at the mercy of Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi, but thought better of it and decided to carry on to Mecca.
On his way to Basra he passed through the Strait of Hormuz, where he learned that Abu Sa'id, last ruler of the Ilkhanate Dynasty had died in Persia. Abu Sa'id's territories had subsequently collapsed due to a fierce civil war between the Persians and Mongols.
In 1348, Ibn Battuta arrived in Damascus with the intention of retracing the route of his first hajj. He then learned that his father had died 15 years earlier and death became the dominant theme for the next year or so. The Black Death had struck, and he stopped in Homs as the plague spread through Syria, Palestine, and Arabia. He heard of terrible death tolls in Gaza, but returned to Damascus that July where the death toll had reached 2,400 victims each day. When he stopped in Gaza he found it was depopulated, and in Egypt he stayed at Abu Sir. Reportedly deaths in Cairo have reached levels of 1,100 each day. He made hajj to Mecca then he decided to return to Morocco, nearly a quarter of a century after leaving home. On the way he made one last detour to Sardinia, then in 1349, returned to Tangier by way of Fez, only to discover that his mother had also died a few months before.
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After a few days in Tangier, Ibn Battuta set out for a trip to the Muslim-controlled territory of al-Andalus on the Iberian Peninsula. King Alfonso XI of Castile and León had threatened to attack Gibraltar, so in 1350, Ibn Battuta joined a group of Muslims leaving Tangier with the intention of defending the port. By the time he arrived, the Black Death had killed Alfonso and the threat of invasion had receded, so he turned the trip into a sight-seeing tour, travelling through Valencia and ending up in Granada.
After his departure from al-Andalus he decided to travel through Morocco. On his return home, he stopped for a while in Marrakech, which was almost a ghost town following the recent plague and the transfer of the capital to Fez.
In the autumn of 1351, Ibn Battuta left Fez and made his way to the town of Sijilmasa on the northern edge of the Sahara in present-day Morocco. There he bought a number of camels and stayed for four months. He set out again with a caravan in February 1352 and after 25 days arrived at the dry salt lake bed of Taghaza with its salt mines.
After a ten-day stay in Taghaza, the caravan set out for the oasis of Tasarahla, probably Bir al-Ksaib where it stopped for three days in preparation for the last and most difficult leg of the journey across the vast desert. From Tasarahla, a Masufa scout was sent ahead to the oasis town of Oualata, where he arranged for water to be transported a distance of four days travel where it would meet the thirsty caravan. Oualata was the southern terminus of the trans-Saharan trade route and had recently become part of the Mali Empire. Altogether, the caravan took two months to cross the 1,600 km of desert from Sijilmasa.
From there, Ibn Battuta travelled southwest along a river he believed to be the Nile, it was actually the river Niger, until he reached the capital of the Mali Empire. There he met Mansa Suleyman, king since 1341.
Ibn Battuta's itinerary gives scholars a glimpse as to when Islam first began to spread into the heart of west Africa.
More information: ThoughCo
and gives your heart wings!
Ibn Battuta
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