Ibn Battuta

The remarkable life and travels of Ibn Battuta, the medieval Moroccan explorer who journeyed farther across the fourteenth-century world than any other person of his age.

In the long history of human travel there are a handful of names that stand for the act of journeying itself, and among them the name of Ibn Battuta belongs near the very top. He was a Muslim scholar from the city of Tangier, on the northern coast of Morocco, who set out from home in the summer of 1325 as a young man of twenty-one, intending only to make the pilgrimage to Mecca that every able Muslim hopes to complete once in a lifetime. He did not return for almost a quarter of a century. By the time he came back to settle in his own country, he had traveled across the whole breadth of the known Islamic world and well beyond its edges, visiting the territory of more than forty modern nations, covering by the most common estimate some seventy-five thousand miles, and gathering in his memory a store of observation, anecdote, and adventure that has no equal in the medieval record. The question of who Ibn Battuta was, and how a provincial pilgrim became the most widely traveled man of the pre-modern age, is one of the most absorbing stories that history has to offer.

Ibn Battuta is often introduced to readers in the West through a comparison with Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant whose account of his years in the service of the Mongol emperor of China appeared roughly a generation before the Moroccan was born. The comparison is natural and not unhelpful, but it can also mislead. Marco Polo made essentially one immense outward-and-back journey along a single axis, from Venice to the court of Kublai Khan and home again. Ibn Battuta did something different and, in sheer geographic range, larger. He did not travel in one direction but in every direction, weaving back and forth across Africa, Arabia, Persia, the steppes of Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the islands of the Indian Ocean, Southeast Asia, and China, and later turning south across the Sahara Desert to the empire of Mali. He traveled, moreover, almost entirely within a single vast civilization. The Islamic world of the fourteenth century stretched without interruption from the Atlantic shore of Morocco to the trading ports of southern China, and Ibn Battuta moved through it as a member of an international community of believers, scholars, and lawyers, welcomed wherever he went by the shared language of religion, law, and learning. His travels are, among many other things, a portrait of that civilization at a particular moment, seen from the inside by one of its own.

What makes Ibn Battuta so valuable, and so endlessly interesting, is not only the distance he covered but the kind of witness he was. He was not a merchant calculating profit, nor a soldier on campaign, nor a diplomat with a fixed mission, though at various times he played at being all three. He was, by training and by temperament, a man of the law and of religion, a member of the educated Muslim class for whom the world was held together by a common faith and a common body of jurisprudence. He noticed the things such a man would notice: the piety or laxity of the people he met, the generosity of rulers, the customs of marriage and mourning, the food on the table, the behavior of women, the strangeness of foreign manners, the quality of the scholars in each city, the tombs of saints and the shrines worth visiting. He was curious, talkative, easily delighted, sometimes credulous, often vain, and almost always engaging. The book that preserves his life, dictated long after the journeys were over, is not a dry itinerary but a crowded, vivid, gossipy human document, and it has carried his name down nearly seven hundred years.

That book is known simply as the Rihla, an Arabic word meaning a journey or a travel account, and it is the single source for almost everything that can be said about Ibn Battuta's life. He left no other writings, no letters, no documents of the kind that anchor the biographies of better-recorded figures. He exists for posterity entirely within the pages he dictated, near the end of his traveling life, to a young literary scholar at the court of the Moroccan sultan. This fact gives the study of Ibn Battuta a peculiar character. To ask what did Ibn Battuta actually see and where did he really go is to ask how far the Rihla can be trusted, and that question has occupied scholars for generations. But before weighing the book it is best to follow the story it tells, beginning where Ibn Battuta himself began, in the world into which he was born.

The Fourteenth-Century World of Ibn Battuta

To understand the journeys of Ibn Battuta, one must first picture the world that made them possible, because in important ways that world has no modern equivalent. The fourteenth century was the great age of what historians sometimes call the unified Islamic civilization, the vast zone of interconnected lands, peoples, and cities bound together by a common religion. This zone, often referred to by the Arabic term Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, was not a single state. It was a patchwork of sultanates, khanates, emirates, and kingdoms, frequently at war with one another, ruled by dynasties of wildly different origin. But across all of it ran a set of unifying threads. The religion of Islam was practiced from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Arabic language served as the universal medium of scripture, scholarship, and law, even where ordinary people spoke Persian, Turkish, Berber, or a hundred other tongues. And a shared legal and educational culture meant that an educated Muslim could travel for years and still find himself, in city after city, among people who recognized his learning, honored his profession, and lived by rules he understood.

It was a world, in other words, built for a traveler like Ibn Battuta. A Muslim scholar could leave Morocco and arrive, months later, in a city in India or on an island in the Indian Ocean and still find a mosque to pray in, a judge who applied a familiar law, a school where the same texts were taught, and a ruler eager to display his piety by entertaining a learned visitor from far away. The institution of the pilgrimage to Mecca reinforced all of this. Every year, tens of thousands of believers converged from every corner of the Muslim world upon a single city in the Arabian Peninsula, and the great pilgrim caravans, with their guards, their supplies, and their seasoned guides, were among the safest and most reliable means of long-distance travel that the age possessed. The hajj was at once a religious obligation and a colossal annual exercise in human mobility, and Ibn Battuta's whole career grew out of it.

The fourteenth century was also a moment when the Mongol conquests of the previous hundred years had reshaped the map of Asia in ways that, paradoxically, made travel easier. The Mongol expansion had been catastrophically violent, and Ibn Battuta would walk among the ruins it left behind, but by his lifetime the great Mongol successor states had settled into something like stability, and several of their ruling houses had converted to Islam. The Golden Horde controlled the steppes north of the Black and Caspian seas. The Ilkhanate had ruled Persia and Iraq, though it was breaking apart in Ibn Battuta's day. The Chagatai Khanate held Central Asia. Far to the east, the Yuan dynasty of Kublai Khan's descendants governed China. Trade and travel moved across this Mongol-shaped world along routes that, for a few decades, were unusually open. The Indian Ocean, meanwhile, carried a flourishing maritime commerce that linked East Africa, Arabia, India, Southeast Asia, and China in a web of monsoon-driven sea lanes. Ibn Battuta would travel all of these systems in turn, the desert caravan, the steppe road, the river boat, and the ocean-going ship.

This was, however, no golden age of simple peace and prosperity. The fourteenth century was a hard and often terrifying time to be alive. Political violence was constant; rulers rose and fell, frequently by murder, and Ibn Battuta would see more than one court convulsed by conspiracy and execution. Travel was genuinely dangerous, threatened by bandits on land and by pirates and storms at sea, and the Rihla records shipwreck, robbery, illness, and the deaths of companions as ordinary hazards of the road. And looming over the entire period was the catastrophe that would define it for European and Middle Eastern memory alike. In the late 1340s the pandemic known as the Black Death swept out of Central Asia across the whole of the connected world, killing, by many estimates, a third or more of the population of the lands it touched. Ibn Battuta lived through it, was present in Syria as it raged, and recorded what he saw. His life therefore spans the very world that the plague would help to break apart. The age of relatively open long-distance travel that made his journeys possible was, in a sense, already ending as he wrote them down.

Within this civilization the figure of the religious scholar held a particular and honored place. Islam had no priesthood and no church in the institutional sense, but it possessed a learned class, the people referred to collectively as the ulama, the scholars of religion and law. These men studied the Quran, the traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, and the immense body of jurisprudence that Muslim societies used to regulate everything from prayer to inheritance to commerce. The most respected among them served as judges, known as qadis, who applied religious law in the courts, and as jurists, teachers, and prayer leaders. A qadi was a figure of real authority and real income, and the profession traveled well, because the law he administered was, in its essentials, the same across thousands of miles. Ibn Battuta was born into exactly this class. His was a family of judges, and he was educated for the law. When he set out for Mecca he carried with him not merely his piety but a professional identity that would open doors, secure patronage, and, on more than one occasion, place him in positions of power in lands utterly foreign to the one where he was born.

Tangier and a Family of Judges

Ibn Battuta was born in the city of Tangier on the twenty-fourth of February in the year 1304, a date that corresponds, in the Islamic calendar that governed his own world, to a day in the month of Rajab in the year 703. His full name, in the elaborate fashion of Arabic naming, was Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji, a string of words that records his given name, his father and forefathers, the tribe to which his family belonged, and the city from which he came. The element al-Lawati identifies his descent from a Berber tribe called the Lawata, long established in North Africa; the element al-Tanji simply means the man from Tangier. To the world he became, and remains, Ibn Battuta, a shortened family name whose exact meaning has been variously explained but which served, then as now, as the convenient label for an individual whose full designation was a paragraph in itself.

Tangier in the early fourteenth century was a modest but ancient port city standing at the extreme northwestern tip of Africa, on the strait where the Mediterranean Sea meets the Atlantic Ocean and where the African and European shores draw close enough to see one another. It was a city of the Maghrib, the Arabic name for the western lands of the Islamic world, the region comprising what is today Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya. To the people of the central Islamic lands, the Maghrib was the far west, a frontier zone, respectable and devout but provincial, distant from the great metropolitan centers of Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad. A man from Tangier who traveled east would always carry, faintly, the status of someone from the edge of things, and Ibn Battuta in his travels was conscious of this. Part of the drive that carried him so far was surely the ambition of a talented young man from the periphery to make his mark in the heartlands of his civilization.

The political master of Tangier and of most of Morocco in Ibn Battuta's youth was the Marinid dynasty, a Berber ruling house that had taken power in the region during the thirteenth century after the collapse of the earlier Almohad empire. The Marinids ruled from the inland city of Fez, which they made a center of learning and architecture, endowing it with mosques and colleges. Their state was reasonably stable and reasonably prosperous, and it was firmly within the orbit of orthodox Sunni Islam, attached to the school of legal interpretation known as the Maliki school, which predominated throughout North Africa and Muslim Spain. Ibn Battuta was raised in this Maliki tradition, and his professional training as a jurist was training in Maliki law specifically. Wherever he went in later life, he remained a Maliki, and this sometimes set him slightly apart in the eastern lands, where other legal schools were more common, but it never prevented him from being recognized as a qualified man of law.

The family into which Ibn Battuta was born belonged to the educated religious class, and several of its members had served as qadis, as judges administering Islamic law. This is a fact of the first importance for understanding his life. He grew up in a household where the law was the family business, where learning was expected, and where the path of a respectable career ran through the study of jurisprudence. His own account says relatively little about his childhood and youth, and almost nothing about his parents as individuals, a reticence that was entirely conventional; medieval Muslim autobiography did not dwell on the private domestic past. But it is clear enough that he received the standard education of a boy of his class. He would have learned to read and to write, would have memorized the Quran, would have studied Arabic grammar and the religious sciences, and would have begun the long apprenticeship in law that produced a qualified jurist. He was not, by the standards of the greatest scholars of his age, a profound or original thinker. He was a competent, conventionally trained man of law, and that competence, more than any brilliance, was the passport that carried him around the world.

It is worth pausing on what it meant, for a young man of Ibn Battuta's background, to be both deeply pious and professionally ambitious, because the two motives ran together through his whole career. The pilgrimage to Mecca was a sacred duty, and his desire to perform it was genuine and devout. But the journey east was also, unmistakably, an opportunity. The great cities of Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz were home to the most celebrated teachers and the most prestigious schools in the Sunni world, and a scholar who had studied there, who had collected the personal endorsements of famous masters, and who could claim to have prayed at the holiest sites of Islam, returned home with his standing immeasurably enhanced. For an able young jurist from the provincial Maghrib, the road to Mecca was also the road to a career. When Ibn Battuta described his own departure, he wrote of being moved by an overpowering impulse and a long-cherished desire to visit the holy places. Both the religious longing and the worldly ambition were real, and neither should be discounted.

The Call of Mecca: Departure in 1325

In the month of June in the year 1325, Ibn Battuta left Tangier and began the journey that would consume the next twenty-four years of his life. He was twenty-one years old. In the famous opening passage of the Rihla he described the moment of departure with a directness that has echoed down the centuries. He set out alone, he wrote, having neither a fellow traveler in whose companionship he might find cheer, nor a caravan whose party he might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within him and a desire long cherished in his heart to visit those illustrious sanctuaries. And so, he continued, he braced his resolution to quit all his dear ones, female and male, and forsook his home as birds forsake their nests. His parents were still living, and he confessed that the parting from them caused him, and them, great pain. He was their only child, or at least the only one his account mentions, and he never saw either of them again. Word of his father's death reached him many years later, on the road; his mother, he would learn far in the future, died in the great plague.

The decision to set out entirely alone, without companions and without joining an organized caravan, was bold to the point of recklessness, and Ibn Battuta knew it. The roads of North Africa were not safe for a solitary traveler. But the loneliness of his first weeks did not last. Travelers in that age naturally gathered together for protection and company, and Ibn Battuta soon attached himself to passing caravans and groups of pilgrims. This pattern, of joining and leaving traveling parties as convenience and safety dictated, would mark the whole of his career. He very rarely traveled truly alone for long. Around him, throughout his journeys, there formed and dissolved a constant succession of companions, fellow pilgrims, merchants, soldiers, servants, slaves, and at many points wives. The solitary departure from Tangier was the exception that the rest of the journey would not repeat.

His route from Tangier ran eastward along the North African coast, through the lands that are today Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, toward Egypt, which was the great gathering point for pilgrims of the western Islamic world traveling to Mecca. This first stage of the journey, the crossing of the Maghrib, taught Ibn Battuta the realities of the traveling life in a series of sharp lessons. He fell ill with a fever so severe that he tied himself to his saddle with a turban cloth in order not to fall from his mount, refusing to stop because the caravan would not wait. He encountered, for the first time, the grief of separation that travel imposes, and he recorded a moment near the start of the journey when he reflected that he was leaving behind everyone and everything he loved. He passed through cities that were each, in their way, a small revelation to a young man who had until then known only Tangier and its region.

Somewhere on this first eastward stage occurred an episode that the Rihla presents as a turning point, and that, whether literally true or shaped in the retelling, captures something essential about Ibn Battuta's understanding of his own life. In one account associated with his early travels, a holy man, a Muslim ascetic of the kind credited with insight into the future, is said to have foretold that the young traveler would wander across the earth and would visit distant lands, and named, in particular, places in the east that Ibn Battuta would indeed eventually reach. Whether or not such a prophecy was ever uttered, its presence in the book reflects the way Ibn Battuta, looking back from old age, saw his journeys as something more than a string of accidents. He came to regard his life of travel as a kind of vocation, a destiny, and the Rihla is shaped throughout by that retrospective sense of a life that was meant to unfold as it did.

By the time he reached the city of Tunis, Ibn Battuta had been on the road for several months, and there he experienced, in a small but telling incident, both the isolation of the stranger and the consolation that his profession could bring. He arrived, by his own account, feeling acutely alone, a young man among crowds who knew no one, and he wept at his solitude until a fellow pilgrim, noticing his distress, befriended him. Soon afterward, the recognition of his learning began to do its work. In Tunis he was treated with respect as a visiting scholar, and when the pilgrim caravan that he joined there needed someone to serve as its qadi, to settle the disputes that inevitably arose among a large body of travelers, the office was given to the young man from Tangier. It was the first time Ibn Battuta held a judicial appointment. It would be very far from the last. Already, on the first leg of his very first journey, the pattern of his life was visible: a scholar of the law, moving among strangers, made suddenly at home by the universal currency of his learning.

Across North Africa: the First Great Stage

The journey across North Africa from Tunis toward Egypt carried Ibn Battuta through a landscape that was, for all its hardships, entirely within the cultural world he knew. The cities of the Maghrib and of what the Arabs called Ifriqiya, the region of modern Tunisia and eastern Algeria, were Arabic-speaking, Muslim, and governed by familiar institutions. Ibn Battuta moved through them as a man among his own kind, and his account of this stage is full of the details that would characterize the whole Rihla: the names of notable scholars he met or hoped to meet, the shrines and tombs he visited, the hospitality he received, and the occasional sharp note of danger. The traveling life he had chosen was strenuous and uncertain, but in these early months it was also a kind of extended education, a young provincial's first sight of the wider world.

It was during this North African stage that Ibn Battuta married for the first time. The Rihla mentions the marriage briefly, as it mentions most of his many marriages, without sentiment and almost in passing. He married the daughter of a fellow traveler, a man of some standing, and the wedding was celebrated on the road. The marriage did not last. Within a short time there was a quarrel, and Ibn Battuta separated from his wife, and then almost immediately married again, this time the daughter of a scholar from Fez. These early unions set a pattern that the modern reader finds striking and that the Rihla treats as wholly unremarkable. Over the course of his travels Ibn Battuta married many times, in many lands, and also acquired, as the customs and the law of his world permitted, a number of concubines, women who were his slaves. He left wives and children behind him across half the world. To him and to his original audience this was simply the ordinary conduct of a prosperous traveling man; marriage was a normal way for a stranger to attach himself, even briefly, to a place, and divorce was easy. To us it is one of the more revealing windows the Rihla opens onto the social assumptions of his age.

The great practical problem of the North African stage was the pilgrim's need to reach Egypt in time to join the annual movement toward Mecca, and the journey was governed throughout by the rhythm of the caravan and the calendar of the hajj. Ibn Battuta traveled in company with the pilgrim caravan, and his appointment as its judge gave him both standing and responsibility. He has left a vivid impression of the caravan as a small mobile society, with its own quarrels and its own loyalties, moving across the desert margins toward the east. The danger of the road was real. At one point the caravan was threatened by hostile tribesmen, and Ibn Battuta recorded the fear and the tension of such moments without disguising them. He was not a soldier and never pretended to be one; what he offers is the experience of an ordinary educated traveler caught up in the perils of a hard journey.

As he moved east through what is now Libya, Ibn Battuta passed through Tripoli and the desert tracks beyond it, drawing closer to the Egyptian frontier. The cities grew larger and the traffic of pilgrims and merchants thicker as he approached the wealthiest and most populous land of the Mediterranean Islamic world. He had now been traveling for the better part of a year. He had buried his solitude, made and ended marriages, served as a judge, suffered fever and fear, and seen more of the world than the overwhelming majority of people of his time would see in a lifetime. And yet, in the scale of the journey that lay ahead of him, he had barely begun. The crossing of North Africa, which had felt to the young traveler like a great adventure, was in truth only the short first leg of a road that would carry him, before it was done, to the rivers of West Africa, the steppes of Russia, the ports of southern China, and the islands of the equatorial Indian Ocean.

Egypt and the City of Cairo

When Ibn Battuta crossed into Egypt in the spring of 1326, he entered what was, by common consent, the greatest and richest country of the Mediterranean Islamic world. Egypt in the fourteenth century was ruled by the Mamluk Sultanate, one of the most remarkable political systems of the medieval age. The Mamluks were a self-perpetuating military caste of soldiers who had originally been imported as slaves, mostly from the Turkish and Circassian peoples of the steppe and the Caucasus, converted to Islam, trained as elite cavalry, and then freed to rule. Power passed not from father to son in an ordinary dynasty but among the ranks of these soldier-aristocrats, and the Mamluk state, for all its internal violence, was formidable. It had halted the Mongol advance into Syria in the previous century, it had extinguished the last of the Crusader strongholds on the Levantine coast, and it presided over a flourishing economy fed by agriculture and by the lucrative trade that passed between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean. Ibn Battuta had arrived in a superpower.

The journey through Egypt brought Ibn Battuta to Alexandria, the famous Mediterranean port, and then up the valley of the Nile and across to the supreme city of the age, Cairo. His description of Cairo is one of the set pieces of the Rihla, and his admiration is unstinting. He called it, in effect, the mother of cities, the metropolis without rival, boundless in its multitude of buildings, peerless in beauty and splendor, the meeting place of comer and goer, the halting place of the feeble and the strong. He marveled at the throngs of people, so numerous, he wrote, that the city seemed to surge like the waves of the sea and could scarcely contain them for all the vastness of its capacity. He described the Nile and the life that depended on it, the boats, the festivals, the markets, the colleges, and the innumerable mosques. Cairo, to the young man from provincial Tangier, was the great revelation of his journey so far, the first true world-city he had ever seen, and his wonder at it survived all the years and all the greater cities that came after.

It was in Egypt that Ibn Battuta first encountered, on a grand scale, the institution that would sustain him through much of his traveling life: the network of charitable and religious establishments that the wealth of the Islamic world poured into the support of piety and learning. Cities like Cairo were full of mosques, of colleges known as madrasas, and of hospices and lodges, often associated with Sufi religious brotherhoods, that existed to house and feed travelers, pilgrims, students, and the poor. A scholar on the road could move from city to city and be lodged, fed, and often given a small allowance at each stop, because the founders of these institutions had endowed them precisely to gain religious merit by the support of the deserving. Ibn Battuta, a qualified jurist and a pilgrim, was exactly the kind of guest such establishments were built to receive. The Rihla is, among other things, a guide to this hospitality network, recording the lodges and their keepers, the quality of their provision, and the welcome they offered, and it was the existence of this network, as much as any personal wealth, that made a journey of twenty-four years materially possible.

In Egypt, Ibn Battuta also began the practice that would mark his entire career as a religious traveler, the seeking out of holy men, learned scholars, and the tombs of saints. He sought audiences with famous shaykhs, the spiritual masters of the Sufi orders, and he collected their blessings and their teachings as a pilgrim collects relics. One episode from his time in Egypt became, in the retelling, almost emblematic of his life. He visited a celebrated holy man, a recluse credited with the gift of foresight, and the holy man, so the Rihla reports, foretold that Ibn Battuta would not reach Mecca by the route he then intended but would travel first through Syria, and predicted that he would one day journey to lands as distant as India and China, naming holy men in those countries whom Ibn Battuta should greet on his behalf. Years later, in India and in China, Ibn Battuta claimed, he met the very men the Egyptian shaykh had named. Whether the story records a genuine prophecy, a coincidence elaborated by memory, or a literary device introduced to give the journeys a shape, it shows how Ibn Battuta, looking back, understood his travels as a destiny gradually revealing itself.

His original plan had been to travel from Egypt directly across the desert and the Red Sea region to Mecca, and he made the attempt, traveling up the Nile and striking eastward toward the Red Sea port from which pilgrims crossed to Arabia. But the attempt failed. The region was disturbed by a local rebellion, the route was unsafe, and Ibn Battuta was forced to turn back. This frustration proved, in the larger pattern of his life, to be a kind of blessing, for it sent him north into Syria, and the Syrian journey would open to him the rich religious and intellectual world of the Levant and connect him at last with the great Damascus pilgrim caravan. The failure of the direct route is also a reminder of how contingent his travels were. Again and again the Rihla shows Ibn Battuta's path bent by accident, by danger, by rumor, by the offer of a patron or the closing of a road. He did not so much plan his journeys as respond, year after year, to the opportunities and obstacles that the world placed in front of him.

The Pilgrim Roads: Palestine, Syria, and Damascus

Turning away from the blocked desert route, Ibn Battuta traveled north out of Egypt and into the lands of the eastern Mediterranean coast, the region that medieval Muslims knew as Bilad al-Sham, the country of Syria in its old and broad sense, which took in modern Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the territory of Israel and Palestine. This region, like Egypt, was under the rule of the Mamluk Sultanate, and it was rich in exactly the things that drew Ibn Battuta: ancient cities, famous scholars, and above all the holy places of three faiths. He traveled through the coastal towns and the interior, visiting the sites associated with the prophets revered in Islam, and he came in time to the city that, after Cairo, made the deepest impression on him of any in the central Islamic lands.

That city was Damascus, and Ibn Battuta's account of it is among the most admiring passages in the entire Rihla. He had reached, by the time he arrived there, one of the supreme centers of Islamic learning and devotion, an ancient city set in a green and well-watered plain, famous for its gardens, its running water, its markets, and above all its great congregational mosque, the Umayyad Mosque, which Ibn Battuta described as one of the most magnificent buildings of the Muslim world. He wrote of Damascus as a place that surpassed all other cities in beauty, and he praised the abundance of its water, the richness of its fruits, and the multitude of its mosques, colleges, and pious foundations. He recorded, with evident pleasure, the charitable endowments of the city, including foundations devoted to such specific and humane purposes as the support of travelers, the dowering of poor brides, the freeing of prisoners, and even, in one case that clearly delighted him, the replacement of dishes accidentally broken by servants, so that a clumsy slave need not face a beating.

Damascus also marked an important stage in Ibn Battuta's professional and religious formation. He spent some weeks in the city, and he used the time to study. He attended the lectures of its scholars, he obtained from a number of them the formal certificates, known as ijazas, that licensed him to transmit particular religious texts and traditions, and he thereby strengthened the scholarly credentials that were the foundation of his standing. The collecting of such certificates was a serious matter in the world of Islamic learning; they linked a scholar, through a chain of named teachers, back across the generations to the original sources of religious knowledge, and they were the proof of a man's qualifications. Ibn Battuta's weeks in Damascus were, in this sense, an investment in the rest of his life, a deepening of the professional identity that would carry him so far.

It was also in Damascus that Ibn Battuta joined the great pilgrim caravan that would carry him at last to Mecca. Each year, when the season of the hajj approached, an enormous caravan formed at Damascus and set out southward through the desert toward the holy cities of Arabia, retracing a route that pilgrims had followed for centuries. The Damascus caravan was a vast, organized, well-defended body, traveling with military escort, with supplies and water arranged at fixed stages, and with the experience of generations behind its logistics. To join it was to enter one of the most reliable travel systems the medieval world possessed. Ibn Battuta, who had set out from Tangier alone and untried, now took his place in this great procession of the faithful, and turned south, after more than a year and a half on the road, toward the destination that had been the original object of his entire journey.

The road south from Damascus passed through the desert by way of staging posts that the Rihla names one after another, and the experience of the pilgrim caravan clearly moved Ibn Battuta deeply. He described the discipline of the march, the night travel to avoid the heat, the wells and the resting places, the mingled population of pilgrims drawn from every land, and the rising sense of anticipation as the caravan approached the holy territory. For a devout young man who had given up home and family for the sake of this journey, the final approach to Mecca was the emotional summit of all his travels so far. He was about to fulfill the sacred duty that had set him on the road, and to stand at last in the city toward which, five times every day, he had turned to pray since childhood. He did not yet know, and could not have imagined, that the completion of the pilgrimage would not be the end of his journey but, in effect, only its true beginning.

The Pilgrimage Completed: Mecca and the Holy Cities

In the autumn of 1326, after journeying with the Damascus caravan through the deserts of Arabia, Ibn Battuta arrived at last in Mecca and accomplished the pilgrimage that had been the original purpose of his departure from Tangier. He was twenty-two years old, and he had been on the road for a little over a year. The completion of the hajj was the central religious experience of his life, and the Rihla treats the holy city with a reverence that rises above its usual lively, anecdotal tone. Ibn Battuta described the sacred precinct, the Kaaba at its heart, the rites of circumambulation, the running between the hills, the standing at the plain of Arafat, and the throngs of pilgrims drawn from every nation of the Muslim world. He had reached the spiritual center of his civilization, the point toward which the whole vast geography of Islam was oriented, and he had done so as a young man who had given up everything familiar in order to get there.

What is most striking about Ibn Battuta's time in Mecca, however, is what it did not do. It did not send him home. A pilgrim who had fulfilled the obligation of the hajj would ordinarily, having earned the honored title of hajji, turn his face back toward his own country and his own family. Ibn Battuta did not. Instead, he chose to remain in the region of the holy cities, and over the following years he would return to Mecca repeatedly, performing the pilgrimage several times in the course of his travels. He found in the Hijaz, the western region of Arabia where Mecca and Medina stand, a congenial environment for a scholar and a pilgrim, a place where he could study, pray, and live within the warm regard that the holy cities extended to learned and devout visitors. But the decision not to go home was also, in retrospect, the decisive moment of his life. Having reached the goal, he discovered in himself not satisfaction but a deepened appetite for travel. The pilgrimage, intended as a destination, had become a doorway.

Ibn Battuta also visited Medina, the second holy city of Islam, the city to which the Prophet Muhammad had emigrated and in which he was buried, and his account of praying at the Prophet's tomb is among the most heartfelt religious passages in the book. The two holy cities, Mecca and Medina, formed together the sacred core of the Muslim world, and to live near them, to study with their scholars, and to perform the rites of pilgrimage again and again was, for a pious man, a privileged and meritorious way of life. Ibn Battuta would in later years describe periods of residence in Mecca with real affection. The city functioned, across the long arc of his travels, as a kind of fixed point, a place he left and returned to, a spiritual home that was not the home of his birth.

Yet the pull of the wider world proved stronger than the pull of pious residence. Within a relatively short time of completing his first pilgrimage, Ibn Battuta was on the move again, and the destination he chose announced the new and grander scale of his ambition. He decided to travel to Iraq and Persia, to the lands of the old Abbasid heartland in the valley of the Tigris and the Euphrates and to the Iranian plateau beyond. This was no longer pilgrimage in the strict sense. It was travel for its own sake, travel driven by curiosity, by the desire to see famous cities and meet famous men, and by the appetite for movement that had now fully taken hold of him. The young pilgrim of 1325 had become, by the later 1320s, something new in the experience of his age: a traveler whose purpose was, increasingly, simply to travel.

Persia and Iraq: Among the Ruins of the Caliphate

The journey into Iraq and Persia took Ibn Battuta into a region heavy with history and scarred by recent catastrophe. Iraq had been, for five centuries, the political and cultural heart of the Islamic world. Its great city, Baghdad, had been the seat of the Abbasid caliphate, the line of rulers who claimed leadership over the whole community of Islam and under whom, in the eighth and ninth centuries, Arabic civilization had reached one of its highest peaks of science, philosophy, literature, and art. But in 1258, less than half a century before Ibn Battuta's birth, Baghdad had been captured and sacked by the Mongols under Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan. The last Abbasid caliph had been killed, the city devastated, and the long age of Baghdad's supremacy brought to a brutal end. When Ibn Battuta reached Baghdad in the late 1320s, he walked through a city that had never recovered, a shrunken survivor of its own former greatness, and his account carries an unmistakable sense of a place living among its ruins.

Ibn Battuta traveled through the shrine cities of Iraq, places of profound importance to Shia Muslims in particular, and he visited Najaf and Karbala and Kufa, recording the tombs and the devotion he found there with the careful attention of a man who collected sacred sites. Although he was himself a Sunni of the Maliki school, his account of the Shia holy places is largely descriptive and respectful, and the Rihla in general shows a traveler willing to observe and report the great variety of practice within Islam, even where he did not share it. He continued into Persia proper, crossing the mountains onto the Iranian plateau and visiting major cities of the region. He saw the city of Tabriz in the northwest, then an important commercial center, and he traveled in the south of Persia to the city of Shiraz, which he admired greatly for its gardens, its scholars, and its beauty, comparing it in his affection to Damascus.

The political condition of Persia and Iraq in these years was unstable, for the Mongol successor state that had ruled the region, the Ilkhanate, was in the process of disintegration. The Ilkhanate had been founded by the same Mongol conquerors who destroyed Baghdad, and over time its rulers had converted to Islam and the dynasty had become, in religion and increasingly in culture, part of the Muslim world. But by the time of Ibn Battuta's visit the line was failing, and within a few years of his passage through the region the Ilkhanate would fragment into a confusion of competing local powers. Ibn Battuta thus traveled through Persia at a moment of political twilight, and his account preserves a picture of its cities and its scholars in the last years before a new round of disorder. He met holy men and jurists, visited shrines, accepted hospitality, and added the experience of the Iranian world to his rapidly expanding knowledge of the lands of Islam.

From Persia and Iraq, Ibn Battuta turned back toward the Hijaz, and he performed the pilgrimage to Mecca again. This return to the holy city, and his residence there for a period afterward, illustrate the rhythm that had now established itself in his life. He would push outward into a new region, traveling for months or years, and then he would draw back toward Mecca, completing another hajj, resting and studying among the holy places, before launching himself outward again on a fresh and longer arc. Mecca was the hub, and the great journeys were the spokes. After this particular return, the next spoke would carry him into territory genuinely strange to a man of the Mediterranean Maghrib, southward down the Red Sea and out along the coast of East Africa, into the world of the Indian Ocean and the monsoon trade.

The Red Sea, Yemen, and the East African Coast

From the Hijaz, Ibn Battuta traveled south, descending the Red Sea region toward the land of Yemen at the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. Yemen was a country of ancient settlement, mountainous and, by the standards of Arabia, well watered and fertile, and it occupied a strategic position at the mouth of the Red Sea, where the sea routes of the Indian Ocean met the road to Egypt and the Mediterranean. Ibn Battuta visited the Yemeni highland cities and the great port of Aden, and his description of Aden is one of the most economically revealing passages in the Rihla. He saw it as a major hub of maritime commerce, a harbor crowded with the shipping of the Indian Ocean, where the merchants grew enormously rich on the trade that passed between India, the lands of the Arabs, and Egypt. Aden gave him his first clear sight of the vast oceanic trading system that he would soon enter, a network of ports and ships and merchant communities binding together the coasts of three continents.

From Aden, Ibn Battuta took ship and sailed down the eastern coast of Africa, into the region that the Arabs called the land of the Zanj, the Swahili coast of what is today Somalia, Kenya, and Tanzania. This was one of the most adventurous stages of his journey so far, and it carried him into a world that, while wholly Muslim in its coastal cities, was culturally distinct from anything he had yet seen. He visited the trading city of Mogadishu, on the coast of modern Somalia, and described it as a large and wealthy town with a thriving commerce, ruled by a sultan, and famous for its textiles. His account of Mogadishu includes a memorable description of the lavish hospitality offered to a distinguished visitor and of the enormous quantities of food set before guests, the kind of close domestic observation that makes the Rihla such a rich social document.

Sailing on south, Ibn Battuta reached the islands and coastal towns of the Swahili world proper, and visited Mombasa, on the coast of modern Kenya, and then Kilwa, on the coast of modern Tanzania, which was in his day the most powerful and prosperous of the Swahili city-states. He admired Kilwa as one of the most beautiful and well-built towns in the world, and he noted the wealth that flowed into it from the trade in gold, which came up the coast from the far south, and from the broader commerce of the Indian Ocean. The Swahili coast was a striking example of the reach of the Islamic world: here, on the eastern shore of Africa, thousands of miles from the Maghrib, were Muslim cities with mosques and qadis and a cultivated mercantile elite, fully part of the civilization to which Ibn Battuta belonged, and yet possessed of their own distinctive character, a blend of African and Arabian and Indian Ocean elements. Ibn Battuta moved among them as a welcomed scholar, and his account remains one of the most important medieval descriptions of the East African coast that survives.

Turning northward again, Ibn Battuta sailed back across the sea, touching at the coast of southern Arabia, at the region of Oman and the trading settlements of the Persian Gulf, before making his way once more toward Mecca. He performed the pilgrimage yet again. By now the pattern of his life was fully formed, and the scale of his travels already exceeded anything that an ordinary man of his time could have conceived. He had crossed North Africa, explored Egypt and Syria, penetrated Iraq and Persia, sailed down the Red Sea, and voyaged along the East African coast. He had performed the hajj several times. He was still not yet thirty years old. And the longest and most consequential journey of his entire life, the journey to India, lay still before him. It would begin not by the obvious route but by an immense northward detour through the lands of the Turks and the Mongols, a detour that would take in the steppes of southern Russia and a winter visit to the Christian city of Constantinople.

The Land of the Turks: Anatolia and Its Princes

When Ibn Battuta resolved to travel to India, he did not sail directly across the Arabian Sea, the route that merchants ordinarily used. Instead he chose an extraordinary roundabout path, sailing first to Anatolia, the great peninsula of Asia Minor that forms the bulk of modern Turkey, and then traveling overland and across the steppes by an enormous northern arc. The choice is characteristic of him. He was drawn by curiosity, by the reports of wealthy and generous rulers, and by the simple desire to see lands he had not seen. He took ship from the Syrian coast and crossed to the southern shore of Anatolia, entering a region that was, in his day, in the midst of a profound transformation.

Anatolia in the early fourteenth century was a frontier in motion. For centuries it had been the heartland of the Christian Byzantine Empire, but over the preceding two and a half centuries Turkish Muslim peoples had pushed steadily into it, and by Ibn Battuta's time most of the peninsula was under the rule of Turkish Muslim princes. The old Seljuk sultanate that had once dominated the region had broken apart, and Anatolia was now divided among a patchwork of small Turkish principalities, each ruled by its own emir or bey. Among these many small states was one, in the northwest, ruled by a dynasty whose founder was named Osman, and which would in the centuries after Ibn Battuta's death grow into the Ottoman Empire, one of the most powerful states in world history. When Ibn Battuta passed through, however, the Ottoman principality was still only one Turkish statelet among many, and he had no way of knowing that he was glimpsing the seed of a future empire.

Ibn Battuta's account of his travels through Anatolia is warm and detailed, and it gives a vivid picture of this world of small Turkish courts. He was received with notable generosity by one prince after another, and he praised the Turks repeatedly for their hospitality, their piety, and their open-handedness toward travelers and scholars. He recorded a striking institution that delighted him, the brotherhoods of young men, associations of craftsmen and tradesmen organized for mutual support and for the entertainment of guests, who competed with one another to lodge and feast visiting strangers. Ibn Battuta and his companions were repeatedly the object of this competitive hospitality, sometimes to comic effect, as rival brotherhoods nearly came to blows over the honor of hosting them. His description of these youth brotherhoods is one of the most valuable things in the Rihla, a close account of a social institution that few other sources record so well.

The Anatolian journey also confirmed a development that had been growing for some time in Ibn Battuta's career. He was no longer simply a wandering scholar living on charity. He had become a figure of standing, a celebrated traveler whom rulers were pleased to honor, and he had begun to accumulate, from the gifts of his hosts, a real degree of wealth. Princes gave him horses, robes, slaves, and money. He traveled now with a retinue, with servants and companions and dependents, and he moved through the world as a man of consequence. This accumulation of gifts and followers was itself a kind of momentum. A traveler who arrived in a new land with a retinue and a reputation was treated as someone important, which led to further gifts, which enlarged the retinue further. Ibn Battuta's fame, in a sense, traveled with him and grew as it went, and by the time he turned north out of Anatolia toward the steppe he was prepared to present himself, at the courts of far greater rulers, as a personage worth receiving.

The Golden Horde and the Journey to Constantinople

From the Black Sea coast of Anatolia, Ibn Battuta took ship across the Black Sea and entered the vast domain of the Golden Horde, the Mongol successor state that ruled the steppes and the river valleys of what is now southern Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. The Golden Horde had been founded by the descendants of Genghis Khan in the thirteenth century, and by Ibn Battuta's day its ruling house had converted to Islam, which meant that this immense steppe empire, however foreign its nomadic way of life might seem to a man of the Mediterranean cities, was nonetheless part of the Dar al-Islam, a land where Ibn Battuta could expect to be received as a fellow Muslim. The ruler of the Golden Horde at the time of his visit was the khan known as Uzbeg, or Oz Beg, one of the most powerful monarchs of the age, and Ibn Battuta was eager to reach his court.

The steppe presented Ibn Battuta with a way of life utterly different from the urban, settled civilization he knew. The Mongols and Turks of the Golden Horde were pastoral nomads, moving with their herds across the open grassland, living in felt tents, and traveling, when the court itself moved, in a great mobile city of wagons. Ibn Battuta has left a famous description of the khan's traveling encampment, an entire moving town of tents and carts, with its mosques and markets transported on wheels across the steppe. He observed the nomads with the fascinated eye of an outsider, recording their food, in particular the fermented mare's milk that he found difficult to stomach, their clothing, their endurance of cold, and their customs. He was especially struck, and on the whole favorably impressed, by the position of women among the Turks of the steppe, who enjoyed a freedom and a public visibility that astonished a man accustomed to the secluded domestic women of the Arab cities. He described seeing the wives of the khan riding openly, honored and unconcealed, and he remarked on the respect that Turkish men showed their womenfolk.

The most celebrated episode of Ibn Battuta's time in the Golden Horde was his journey to Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire and the only major city outside the Islamic world that he is known to have visited. The opportunity arose through the household of the khan. One of Uzbeg Khan's wives was a Byzantine princess, a daughter of the reigning Byzantine emperor, who had been sent to marry the Mongol ruler. This princess, pregnant, was granted permission to return to her father's city to give birth among her own people, and a large escort was assembled to accompany her on the long journey to Constantinople. Ibn Battuta, by his own account, talked his way into joining this expedition, and so a Muslim jurist from Tangier found himself traveling, in the entourage of a Byzantine princess, toward the great Christian capital on the Bosphorus.

Ibn Battuta's description of Constantinople is one of the most fascinating sections of the Rihla precisely because it shows him, for once, entirely outside his own world. He described the city, its great church, the building known as the Hagia Sophia, which he viewed from outside without entering, since entry would have required an act of reverence he was unwilling as a Muslim to perform. He described the Christian monks and clergy, the markets, and the manners of the Byzantines. He recorded an audience with the emperor, who received him courteously and questioned him, through interpreters, about Jerusalem and the holy places, since the emperor knew that his Muslim visitor had traveled in the Holy Land. He even claimed to have met, living as a monk in retirement, the emperor's predecessor, who had abdicated the throne. The accuracy of every detail in Ibn Battuta's Constantinople narrative has been debated by scholars, and the chronology of this northern journey is one of the genuine puzzles of the Rihla, but the section remains a remarkable thing: a medieval Muslim traveler's eyewitness portrait of the Christian imperial city, observed with curiosity and reported, on the whole, without hostility. After some weeks in Constantinople, Ibn Battuta rejoined the world he knew, traveling back across the steppe to the domain of the Golden Horde, and from there he prepared for the next and greatest stage of his life, the long road across Central Asia to India.

Across Central Asia to the Gates of India

The journey from the lands of the Golden Horde to India was one of the longest and most demanding overland passages that Ibn Battuta ever undertook. It carried him across the heart of Central Asia, through territories that had been the scene of the most destructive of all the Mongol conquests a century before, and it tested his endurance as few other stages of his travels did. He crossed the steppes and deserts to reach the ancient cities of Transoxiana, the region between the great rivers known to the Greeks as the Oxus and the Jaxartes, in what is today Uzbekistan and the surrounding states. These were storied names in the history of Islamic civilization, and Ibn Battuta visited them with the eagerness of a man who had read of their former glory.

He came to Bukhara, once one of the supreme centers of Islamic learning, a city whose scholars and libraries had been famous throughout the Muslim world. But the Bukhara that Ibn Battuta saw was a city in decline, its mosques and colleges, as he recorded with sorrow, lying ruined or abandoned, the great age of its scholarship belonging to a past that the Mongol devastation had cut off. He visited Samarkand, another of the legendary cities of the region, and admired it, though it too bore the marks of conquest and disruption. His account of Transoxiana is shadowed throughout by the sense of a civilization that had suffered an enormous wound. The Mongol conquests, which in their later, settled phase had made long-distance travel possible, had in their first, violent phase shattered the urban culture of Central Asia, and Ibn Battuta walked through the long aftermath.

It was during this Central Asian stage that Ibn Battuta visited the court of one of the most important rulers he ever met, the khan of the Chagatai Mongols, the dynasty that governed Central Asia, a ruler whom he names as Tarmashirin and who had converted to Islam. Ibn Battuta described him as a powerful and pious monarch, and recorded his court and his observance of the faith with approval. The visit illustrates again the pattern of his progress across the world: from court to court, from patron to patron, a learned and pious visitor moving among Muslim rulers who gained merit and prestige by receiving him, and who sped him on his way with gifts. Not long after Ibn Battuta's visit, this khan was overthrown, one more reminder of the political violence that ran beneath the surface of the world he traveled.

From Transoxiana, Ibn Battuta pressed on southward and eastward, crossing the high and difficult country of what is now Afghanistan, traversing the mountains, and approaching at last the river that the Muslims regarded as the boundary of India, the Indus. He had been traveling, by this point, for many years, and he had crossed a substantial part of the Eurasian landmass to reach this frontier. Ahead of him lay the Sultanate of Delhi, a wealthy and powerful Muslim kingdom that ruled the northern part of the Indian subcontinent, and a ruler whose reputation for both lavish generosity and terrifying cruelty had spread across the whole Islamic world. Ibn Battuta was traveling toward that ruler deliberately, drawn by the reports of a sultan who showered foreign scholars with riches. He crossed the Indus River, by his own dating, in September of 1333, and entered the country in which he would spend the longest single stretch of his entire traveling life.

The Sultanate of Delhi and Muhammad Bin Tughluq

The Sultanate of Delhi, which Ibn Battuta entered in the 1330s, was the dominant Muslim power of the Indian subcontinent and one of the richest states in the world. Muslim armies had been campaigning in India for centuries, and a Muslim sultanate had been established at Delhi for well over a hundred years, ruling over a vast population that remained, in its great majority, Hindu. The sultanate was a state of immense wealth, drawn from the agricultural riches and the dense population of the Indian plains, and its court was famous for a magnificence that drew ambitious men, scholars, soldiers, and adventurers, from across the Islamic world. Ibn Battuta had come to India precisely because he had heard of this wealth and of the sultan's habit of bestowing it, with spectacular liberality, upon learned foreigners.

The ruler of the Delhi Sultanate at the time of Ibn Battuta's arrival was Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, and he is one of the most extraordinary figures in the entire Rihla. Ibn Battuta's portrait of him is justly famous, and it is famous because it is so deeply, so disturbingly contradictory. Muhammad bin Tughluq was, in Ibn Battuta's telling, a man of genuine learning, intelligent, eloquent, interested in philosophy and the sciences, capable of dazzling generosity, scrupulous in certain observances of religion, and endowed with real personal charm. He was also, in the same telling, a ruler of appalling and capricious cruelty, who put men to death on a scale and with a casualness that horrified even an age accustomed to harsh punishment. Ibn Battuta wrote that of all men the sultan most loved the bestowing of gifts and the shedding of blood, and that at the gate of his palace there could always be seen some pauper raised to riches or some living man condemned to death. The image of the palace gate, where wealth and execution waited side by side, is one of the indelible pictures the Rihla has left to history.

Muhammad bin Tughluq's reign was marked by a series of grand and disastrous schemes that have made him a byword, in the later history of India, for brilliant ideas ruined by ruthless and impractical execution. He attempted to move the capital, with its entire population, from Delhi to a city far to the south, a project that caused enormous suffering and ultimately failed. He experimented with a token currency, issuing coins of base metal as the equivalent of silver and gold, a policy that collapsed amid forgery and economic chaos. He raised taxes in ways that provoked famine and rebellion. His reign was a long convulsion of ambition, repression, revolt, and punishment, and Ibn Battuta, who served him for years, was a close witness to it, near enough to the center of power to see both its splendor and its terror.

For Ibn Battuta personally, the encounter with Muhammad bin Tughluq was the great opportunity of his life and also, in the end, a source of real danger. The sultan, true to his reputation, received the traveler with overwhelming generosity. Ibn Battuta arrived as a distinguished foreign scholar, exactly the kind of man the sultan delighted to honor, and he was given gifts, an allowance, and, before long, a major appointment. Muhammad bin Tughluq named him qadi of Delhi, the judge of the capital, a position of great prestige and great income, charging him with the administration of Islamic law in the chief city of the sultanate. The provincial jurist from Tangier, who had set out alone and weeping eight years before, was now one of the senior judicial officers of one of the wealthiest empires on earth. It was the summit of his worldly career. But to serve Muhammad bin Tughluq was to live close to a man whose favor could turn, without warning, into a death sentence, and the years Ibn Battuta spent in the sultan's service would be years lived, as he well understood, on the edge of a precipice.

A Judge in Delhi and a Fall from Favor

Ibn Battuta spent something close to eight years in India, and most of that time was spent in or around Delhi in the service of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. His position as qadi of the capital made him a wealthy man, at least on paper. The salary attached to the office was very large, and the sultan supplemented it with grants of land and with gifts. Ibn Battuta lived, during the good years, in considerable style, maintaining a substantial household, supporting wives and concubines and children, and surrounded by the servants and dependents proper to a man of his rank. The boy from Tangier had reached a height of worldly success that few travelers of any age have matched, holding high office under one of the richest monarchs on earth.

Yet the position was precarious in a way that Ibn Battuta never forgot. He was acutely aware that he served a ruler who could destroy him on a whim, and the Rihla records his anxiety with unusual frankness. Muhammad bin Tughluq's generosity was real, but it was inseparable from his terror, and the men he raised up he could also, suddenly, cast down and kill. Ibn Battuta watched courtiers and officials fall, watched executions follow favor, and lived always with the knowledge that his own turn might come. He has left an account of the practical realities of the office of qadi under such a sovereign, including the awkward fact that the salary, however large in principle, was tied to revenues that were not always reliably collected, so that the wealth of a high official was a more fragile thing than it appeared.

There were, moreover, genuine difficulties in the work itself. Ibn Battuta was a Maliki jurist, trained in the school of law that prevailed in his native Maghrib, but the Muslims of India largely followed a different school, the Hanafi school, and this divergence created practical complications in a judge whose rulings were meant to be applied to the local population. He also did not, at least at first, command the local languages, and he depended on others to bridge the gap. The Rihla is candid about these frictions, and it gives the reader a sense of Ibn Battuta as a foreigner in a position of authority, his prestige as an exotic and learned import partly offsetting, but never quite erasing, the awkwardness of his outsider status.

The crisis that ended Ibn Battuta's Indian career grew out of exactly the danger he had always feared. He had become acquainted with a Sufi shaykh, a holy man whom the sultan came to regard as a traitor, and when that shaykh was arrested and put to death, suspicion fell upon those who had associated with him. Ibn Battuta, who had visited the condemned man, found himself under a cloud, watched by the sultan's agents and in real fear for his life. He responded to the danger in a manner that says a great deal about both his temperament and the religious culture of his world. He withdrew from public life, attached himself to a Sufi devotional regime, fasted, prayed, and gave himself over to a period of intense religious austerity, in part from genuine piety and in part, surely, as a strategy of survival, making himself conspicuously harmless and holy until the sultan's suspicion passed. The strategy worked. The sultan's mood turned, and instead of destroying Ibn Battuta, Muhammad bin Tughluq summoned him back to favor and gave him a new and remarkable commission, one that would carry the traveler out of India altogether.

The Embassy to China and Disaster on the Coast

The commission that the sultan gave Ibn Battuta in 1341 was to lead an embassy to the emperor of China. The Yuan dynasty, the line of Mongol emperors descended from Kublai Khan, ruled China at this time, and an exchange of envoys and gifts had been proposed between the Chinese court and the Sultanate of Delhi. Muhammad bin Tughluq chose Ibn Battuta to head the Indian mission, a striking mark of confidence in a man who had so recently been under suspicion, and the appointment offered Ibn Battuta exactly what he most wanted, an honorable reason to leave the dangerous court of Delhi and a passport to the one great civilization of the connected world that he had not yet seen.

The embassy set out from Delhi laden with the gifts that were to be presented to the Chinese emperor, a treasure that included, by Ibn Battuta's account, large numbers of slaves, dancers, fine cloths, and other valuables, and it traveled under a substantial military escort. Almost from the beginning, the journey was a catastrophe. The party had not gone far from Delhi when it was attacked by a body of hostile Hindu rebels, and in the fighting Ibn Battuta became separated from his companions and found himself, briefly, a prisoner. He was robbed of nearly everything he carried, threatened with death, and held captive before he managed, after some days of terror and wandering, to escape and rejoin the survivors of the expedition. The episode is one of the most harrowing in the Rihla, and Ibn Battuta's account of his fear, his exhaustion, and his desperate flight is unusually raw and personal.

The embassy regrouped and continued, making its way down through India to the southwestern coast, to the great port city of Calicut on the Malabar coast, one of the busiest harbors of the entire Indian Ocean and a principal point of contact between the trade of India and the trade of China. Here the ships that were to carry the embassy across the ocean were prepared and loaded. And here the expedition met its final and decisive disaster. Ibn Battuta had gone ashore, by his account, to attend the Friday prayer, leaving the embassy's goods and personnel aboard the assembled vessels. While he was on land, a sudden and violent storm struck the harbor. The ships were wrecked or driven out to sea. The gifts intended for the emperor of China, and many of the people of the embassy, were lost. Ibn Battuta stood on the shore of Calicut and watched the destruction of the mission he had been entrusted to lead, and watched, with it, the destruction of his property and his prospects.

The wreck at Calicut left Ibn Battuta in an impossible position. He could not continue to China without the gifts and the embassy that had been the whole substance of his mission. He could not return to Delhi, for to come back to Muhammad bin Tughluq having lost the sultan's treasure and failed in the sultan's commission would have been, very probably, a death sentence. He was, in effect, marooned, a man of high rank suddenly stripped of his mission, his wealth, and his safety, standing on the coast of southern India with no clear way forward and no possibility of going back. The decision he made in this crisis would shape the remaining years of his travels. Rather than return to Delhi or abandon his journey, he chose to keep moving, on his own account, and he turned toward the islands that lay scattered in the ocean to the southwest of India, the coral atolls of the Maldives.

The Maldive Islands

The Maldive Islands, where Ibn Battuta arrived after the disaster at Calicut, are a long chain of low coral atolls stretching across the equatorial waters of the Indian Ocean to the southwest of India and Sri Lanka. They were, and are, a place utterly unlike anything in the continental world Ibn Battuta had spent his life crossing, a scattering of small, flat, palm-covered islands set in a warm sea, their people supported by fishing, by the harvesting of coconuts, and by the production of two commodities much valued in the wider Indian Ocean trade, dried fish and the small white cowrie shells that served as currency across large parts of Africa and Asia. The Maldives had been a Muslim society for about two centuries when Ibn Battuta came to them, having converted, according to local tradition, in the twelfth century, and they were therefore a part, however remote, of the Islamic world.

For exactly that reason, the arrival of a learned Maliki jurist who had been qadi of Delhi was, to the rulers of the Maldives, an event of real importance. Qualified judges trained in Islamic law were scarce in so isolated a place, and a man of Ibn Battuta's evident credentials was a prize. The Maldivian authorities, recognizing his value, were determined to keep him, and Ibn Battuta found himself, as he put it, half-detained, pressed and flattered and maneuvered into staying when he would have preferred to move on. He was appointed qadi of the islands, and so, for the second time in his life, after Delhi, he held the office of chief judge of a Muslim state, this time of a small island sultanate at the edge of the world.

Ibn Battuta's time in the Maldives is one of the most socially revealing episodes of the entire Rihla, because it shows him not merely passing through a place but living in it, exercising power in it, and becoming entangled in its politics. He married into the Maldivian elite, taking several wives connected to the ruling families, and through these marriages and through his office he became a figure of consequence in the islands' affairs. As a judge he attempted to impose what he regarded as the proper rigor of Islamic law upon a population whose practice he considered lax. He was scandalized, in particular, by the dress of Maldivian women, who by the custom of the islands went about with the upper body uncovered, and he tried, with very limited success, to compel them to dress as he thought modesty required. His account is a fascinating record of the collision between the universal law he carried and the local custom he encountered, and it shows, with unusual clarity, the limits of a foreign judge's power to reshape a society to his own standards.

In the end, Ibn Battuta's involvement in Maldivian politics grew too deep and too dangerous, and he came to be at odds with the dominant powers of the islands. He decided, or was effectively forced, to leave, and the manner of his departure was characteristically complicated, entangled with quarrels, with the question of his wives and his property, and with the suspicion of the islands' rulers. But leave he did, sailing away from the Maldives toward the great island that lay to the east of the southern tip of India, the island that Ibn Battuta and his contemporaries knew under various names and that is today called Sri Lanka. He would, years later, return briefly to the Maldives, but the main chapter of his island life was over, and ahead of him lay Ceylon, the Coromandel coast, the Bay of Bengal, and the long sea road toward Southeast Asia and China.

Ceylon and the Southeast Asian Voyage

The island that Ibn Battuta reached after leaving the Maldives, the island of Ceylon or Sri Lanka, was not a Muslim land. It was a predominantly Buddhist country, with Hindu communities as well, and it lay somewhat outside the network of Muslim courts and institutions that had carried Ibn Battuta across the rest of the world. He went there, nonetheless, drawn by a specific and famous goal. Rising from the interior of the island is a great conical mountain, known to many traditions as Adam's Peak, on the summit of which is a large hollow in the rock that resembles a giant footprint. To Muslims, this footprint was associated with Adam, the first man, and the mountain was therefore a place of pilgrimage. Ibn Battuta, the inveterate visitor of holy places, was determined to climb it, and his account of the ascent of Adam's Peak, of the chains fixed to the rock to help pilgrims up the steepest stretches, and of the footprint at the top, is one of the memorable passages of the Rihla. He also recorded, with the wonder of a man from a different world, the wealth of the island, its cinnamon, its elephants, and above all its precious stones, the rubies and other gems for which Ceylon was famous.

From Ceylon, Ibn Battuta continued his travels around the rim of the Bay of Bengal, touching the Coromandel coast of southeastern India and then sailing onward to the region of Bengal, in the northeast of the subcontinent, where the great rivers of the Ganges system reach the sea. Bengal was a wealthy and populous land, and by Ibn Battuta's time it was ruled by an independent Muslim sultanate, so that here, once again, he found himself among Muslim institutions and Muslim rulers. He remarked on the extraordinary cheapness and abundance of food in Bengal, a fertile delta country, and his observations on the prices of rice and other goods are of real interest to economic historians. From Bengal he traveled on, by his account, into the mountainous country toward the northeast and then took ship once more, sailing into the seas of Southeast Asia.

The Southeast Asian stage of Ibn Battuta's travels carried him into the world of the great trading ports of the Malay archipelago and the Indonesian islands, the region that lay astride the sea route between India and China and that grew rich on the commerce passing through it. He visited, in particular, the island of Sumatra, where he found, on its northern tip, a Muslim sultanate, one of the earliest footholds of Islam in the region that today contains the largest Muslim population of any country on earth. He was received there, as so often, with the hospitality due to a learned and devout traveler, and he recorded the ruler and the court with approval, noting the sultan's piety and his interest in religious learning. Southeast Asia, in Ibn Battuta's account, appears as a frontier of the expanding Islamic world, a place where the faith was newly and incompletely established, surrounded by populations of other religions, and Ibn Battuta the observer noted both the Muslim courts and the non-Muslim peoples among whom they were set.

From the ports of Southeast Asia, Ibn Battuta took ship for the final and most distant of all his great destinations, the empire of China. The voyage across the South China Sea was the longest open-water passage of his career, and it carried him to the one major civilization of the connected world that lay wholly outside the Dar al-Islam, a vast, ancient, and powerful empire with its own religions, its own writing, its own customs, and its own deep sense of itself as the center of the world. Ibn Battuta approached China as the supreme stranger, and his account of it is, in consequence, both the most exotic and, to modern scholars, the most problematic section of the entire Rihla.

The Journey to China

China in the time of Ibn Battuta was ruled by the Yuan dynasty, the Mongol imperial house founded by Kublai Khan, the same dynasty whose service Marco Polo had famously claimed to enter two generations earlier. Under Mongol rule, China was connected as never before to the trading networks of the wider world, and its great southern ports received the ships of the Indian Ocean and sent out their own. Ibn Battuta's account describes his arrival in southern China at a major port that he calls Zaytun, generally identified with the city known today as Quanzhou, which was in his day one of the largest and busiest harbors on earth, a place where the Muslim merchant community was substantial enough to have its own mosques, its own quarter, and its own qadi. Even in China, in other words, Ibn Battuta found outposts of the world he knew, communities of fellow Muslims engaged in trade, and this fact shaped his experience of the country. He moved, to a significant degree, within the Muslim diaspora of the Chinese ports rather than in Chinese society at large.

Ibn Battuta's descriptions of China are full of wonder, and they record the things that astonished a medieval visitor from the Islamic world. He marveled at the size and order of Chinese cities, at the density of the population, at the great rivers and canals crowded with shipping, and at the security of travel within the empire. He described, with admiration, the skill of Chinese craftsmen, especially the makers of porcelain and of silk, goods that were exported across the whole of the trading world. He recorded the Chinese use of paper money in place of coin, a practice that struck a man accustomed to gold and silver as a genuine marvel. He noted the Chinese custom of recording and depicting travelers and foreigners, and he expressed a kind of unease at how completely a stranger was observed and accounted for within the Chinese system. Yet he also confessed that China, for all its wealth and order, did not delight him. It was a land of unbelievers, and Ibn Battuta, the devout Muslim, felt in it a spiritual discomfort. He wrote that whenever he went out of his lodging he saw things that disturbed him, and that he preferred to remain indoors, and that the sight of so much that was contrary to his faith oppressed him. China impressed him, but it did not win his heart.

The Chinese section of the Rihla is also the section that scholars have scrutinized most skeptically, and it must be approached with caution. The narrative of Ibn Battuta's movements within China is geographically confused in places, the chronology is difficult to reconcile, and some of the marvels he reports, including a famous account of an audience associated with the Chinese court, have struck many historians as exaggerated, garbled, or possibly borrowed from the common stock of travelers' tales. There is genuine and unresolved debate among scholars about how much of China Ibn Battuta actually saw, how far inland he truly traveled, and how much of his Chinese narrative rests on direct experience as opposed to hearsay collected in the port cities or material absorbed from other sources. What is not in doubt is that Ibn Battuta reached the coast of China; the Muslim merchant world of the southern Chinese ports was real and well documented, and a traveler of his profile could certainly have moved within it. The uncertainty concerns the interior, and it is part of the larger question of the reliability of the Rihla, a question to which any honest account of Ibn Battuta must return.

Whatever the exact extent of his Chinese travels, China marked the farthest point of Ibn Battuta's eastward journey, the outer limit of a movement that had begun, decades before, at the gate of his father's house in Tangier. From the ports of southern China he turned, at last, toward home. He had been away from Morocco for some twenty years. He had reached the eastern edge of the connected world. He was now a man past his fortieth year, and the long road back would carry him through the very heart of the greatest catastrophe of his century.

The Long Road Home: Plague and Return

The journey home from China retraced, in its broad outline, much of the route by which Ibn Battuta had come. He sailed back across the seas of Southeast Asia, touched again at the Indian coast and the lands of the Indian Ocean, made his way through the Persian Gulf, and traveled up through Persia, Iraq, and Syria toward the Mediterranean. He performed, along the way, what was by his own count one of the last of his several pilgrimages to Mecca. But the world through which he traveled on the way home was not the world he had crossed on the way out. In the years of his absence, a catastrophe of almost unimaginable scale had been gathering, and in the late 1340s it broke across the whole of the connected world. Ibn Battuta's road home ran straight through the Black Death.

The Black Death was the great pandemic of plague that swept out of Central Asia in the 1340s and spread, with terrible speed, across the Middle East, North Africa, and Europe, killing an enormous proportion of the population everywhere it reached. Ibn Battuta encountered it in Syria, and his account is one of the eyewitness records of the pandemic in the Islamic world. He was in the region as the plague raged, and he described the staggering daily death tolls, the mass burials, and above all the religious response of the Muslim population. He recorded, in a famous passage, how the people of Damascus, confronted by the catastrophe, gathered in enormous numbers in penitence and prayer, fasting and walking in vast processions to beg God for relief, Muslims and Jews and Christians together, in a city overwhelmed by death. The passage is a remarkable historical document, and it places Ibn Battuta, the lifelong traveler, as a witness to the defining disaster of his age.

It was also during this homeward journey, somewhere along the road, that Ibn Battuta received the news that finally closed the long account of his own family. He learned that his father had died many years before, while he was far away in the east, and, in the course of these years of return, that his mother too had died, a victim, like so many millions, of the plague. The young man who had wept on leaving his parents in 1325 came home to a Morocco in which both of them were long gone. The personal cost of a life given over to travel, the families left behind, the deaths learned of years late and at second hand, is rarely stated outright in the Rihla, which is not a confessional book, but it is present, all the same, in moments like these.

Ibn Battuta crossed at last from the eastern lands back into North Africa, traveling west along the same Mediterranean coast he had followed as a young man a quarter of a century before, and in the year 1349 he arrived back in Morocco, in the city of Fez, the Marinid capital. He had been away for some twenty-four years. He returned to a country ruled now by a different sultan than the one of his youth, to a city that was the center of Moroccan power and learning, and to a homeland from which his parents had vanished. He was, by the standards of his world, no longer a young man. And yet, even now, his traveling was not finished. Within a short time of his return he would set out twice more, on two further journeys that, while shorter than the great eastern odyssey, carried him to two regions he had never seen and completed, in a sense, his survey of the western Islamic world.

Al-Andalus and the Kingdom of Granada

The first of Ibn Battuta's two final journeys took him north, across the narrow strait that separates Africa from Europe, into the last surviving Muslim state on the European mainland, the kingdom of Granada in southern Spain. The Iberian Peninsula had been, for centuries after the Muslim conquest of the early eighth century, a great center of Islamic civilization, known to the Arabs as al-Andalus. But over the long course of the medieval period the Christian kingdoms of the north had pushed steadily southward in the process that later historians would call the Reconquest, and by Ibn Battuta's lifetime almost the whole of the peninsula had passed into Christian hands. Only the kingdom of Granada, in the mountainous southeast, remained as a Muslim state, a last fragment of al-Andalus, and it survived under constant pressure from the Christian power of Castile to its north.

Ibn Battuta crossed into Spain at a moment of military tension, for the frontier between Muslim Granada and Christian Castile was an active and dangerous one. He traveled to Granada itself, the capital of the kingdom, a city famous for its beauty and for the great palace-fortress of the Alhambra, which the rulers of Granada were building and adorning in exactly this period into one of the supreme monuments of Islamic art. Ibn Battuta's account of Granada is comparatively brief, but it records his visit to this last outpost of Andalusi civilization and his meetings with its scholars. Among the learned men he encountered in Granada was a young literary scholar named Ibn Juzayy. The meeting was, at the time, simply one more of the countless encounters between scholars that fill the Rihla. But it would prove, in the event, to be one of the most important meetings of Ibn Battuta's life, for Ibn Juzayy was the man who would later, in Morocco, take down the dictation of Ibn Battuta's travels and give the Rihla its literary form.

The journey to Granada also gave Ibn Battuta a sense of the embattled condition of Islam at its European frontier. He had, across his long travels, seen the faith flourishing in unexpected places, in the cities of the East African coast, in the islands of the Indian Ocean, in the ports of Southeast Asia. In Spain he saw it in retreat, a Muslim society pressed back into a single mountainous corner of a peninsula it had once dominated, defended by frontier warriors and conscious of its own danger. The kingdom of Granada would, in fact, survive for another century and a half after Ibn Battuta's visit, but it would fall at last to the Christian monarchs of Spain, and with its fall the long history of al-Andalus would end. Ibn Battuta's brief account is one traveler's glimpse of that world in its final phase.

Returning from Spain to Morocco, Ibn Battuta had now seen the western and the eastern limits of the Islamic world, the kingdom of Granada at one extreme and the ports of China at the other. One great region, however, still lay beyond his experience, a region that bordered his own homeland and yet was, to the people of the Mediterranean coast, almost as remote and almost as fabled as the Far East. South of Morocco lay the immense barrier of the Sahara Desert, and beyond the Sahara lay the lands of West Africa, the country the Arabs called the Bilad al-Sudan, the land of the black peoples, and the wealthy empire that dominated it, the empire of Mali. To Mali, across the greatest desert on earth, Ibn Battuta would make the last of all his journeys.

Across the Sahara to the Empire of Mali

The last great journey of Ibn Battuta's life began in the autumn of 1351, when he set out from Morocco to cross the Sahara Desert and travel to the empire of Mali in West Africa. He was now in his late forties, and the journey he had chosen was, in its way, as demanding as anything he had attempted in his youth. The Sahara is the largest hot desert on earth, an immense and lethal barrier of sand, rock, and emptiness, and the trade routes that crossed it were among the hardest and most dangerous of all the world's roads. The crossing was made possible only by the camel and by the long-established system of desert caravans, and by the chain of oases and salt-mining settlements that punctuated the void. Ibn Battuta joined a caravan and committed himself to one of the supreme tests of medieval travel.

The route led south from Morocco to the desert town and salt mine of Taghaza, a place Ibn Battuta described with fascinated horror, a settlement built, almost literally, of salt, where the houses and the mosque were constructed of slabs of rock salt and where the inhabitants endured a harsh existence in order to work the mineral that was, in the West African trade, as valuable as gold. From Taghaza the caravan pressed on across the worst of the desert toward the river and the grasslands of the south, and Ibn Battuta recorded the realities of the crossing, the rationing of water, the danger of losing the way, the guides whose knowledge meant the difference between life and death, and the relief of reaching, at last, the southern edge of the sands and the settled country beyond.

Beyond the desert lay the empire of Mali, the dominant power of the West African savanna, a state grown enormously wealthy on its control of the gold trade. Mali stood astride the upper reaches of the Niger River, and its rulers, who bore the title mansa, governed a broad realm and commanded resources that had made their reputation famous across the whole Islamic world. A generation before Ibn Battuta's visit, an earlier ruler of Mali, the mansa Musa, had made a pilgrimage to Mecca of such legendary splendor, distributing so much gold along the way, that the memory of it had spread from Cairo to Europe. Ibn Battuta arrived at the court of a later ruler, the mansa Sulayman, and his account of the journey is one of the most precious documents in the whole of medieval African history, for it is an eyewitness description, by an educated and observant Muslim visitor, of one of the great states of the West African past.

Ibn Battuta's report on Mali is characteristically frank, and it mixes admiration with disapproval in a manner that tells the reader as much about Ibn Battuta as about Mali. He admired, sincerely and emphatically, certain qualities of the society he found there. He praised the security and order of the empire, observing that a traveler could journey through it in complete safety, free from the fear of robbery or violence. He praised the devotion of Malian Muslims to prayer and to the study of the Quran, noting the care with which they taught their children the scripture and the diligence with which they attended the mosque. These were, to a man of his values, very high virtues. At the same time, he was offended by other things. He was disturbed, as he had been in the Maldives, by customs of dress and of relations between men and women that did not conform to his idea of Islamic propriety, and he recorded certain court ceremonies and practices that struck him as undignified or as survivals of older, non-Islamic tradition. His account of Mali is therefore a complicated and revealing thing, the report of a man encountering a Muslim society very different from his own and measuring it, sometimes generously and sometimes not, against the standard he had carried from the Maghrib. He visited the cities of the Niger, including the river port that served the trading town of Timbuktu, and his observations on the river itself, on the wildlife, including hippopotamuses, and on the daily life of the country, are the foundation of much of what later historians have known about the empire of Mali at its height.

When Ibn Battuta finally turned north again, recrossing the desert toward Morocco, he was responding to a summons from his own sovereign. The Marinid sultan of Morocco had called him home, and Ibn Battuta obeyed, completing the desert crossing in the other direction and returning to Fez. With that return, in the year 1354, the traveling life of Ibn Battuta came to its end. He had been, on and off, a traveler for twenty-nine years. He had seen, by any measure, more of the world than any other person of his century, and very probably more than any person had ever seen before him. Now, at the command of his sultan, he would settle, and his journeys would be transformed into a book.

The Making of the Rihla

The book that preserves Ibn Battuta's life was created at the court of the Marinid sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, who ruled from Fez and who took a personal interest in the remarkable traveler who had returned to his kingdom. It was the sultan who decided that Ibn Battuta's experiences should be set down in writing so that they would not be lost, and it was the sultan who provided the means by which this was done. The actual labor of composition was entrusted to a scholar of letters named Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi, the same young man of Andalusi origin whom Ibn Battuta had met some years earlier during his visit to Granada. Ibn Juzayy was a trained literary stylist, and his task was to take the spoken recollections of Ibn Battuta and shape them into a finished work of Arabic prose.

The method of composition was dictation. Ibn Battuta spoke, recalling his travels, and Ibn Juzayy wrote, organizing the material, polishing the language, and giving the whole the form of a proper book. The work was completed in 1355, the year after Ibn Battuta's final return, roughly thirty years after he had first left Tangier. Its formal Arabic title is long and ornate, in the manner of the time, and it may be rendered into English as A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling. But it has always been known, in practice, by the simple and accurate name of the Rihla, the Travels, and that is the name by which it has come down through the centuries.

The circumstances of the book's composition matter a great deal for any judgment of it, and they introduce, at the outset, a series of cautions. The Rihla was dictated from memory, by a man recalling events that in some cases lay thirty years in the past, events spread across decades and across the better part of the inhabited world. Ibn Battuta had not, so far as the evidence shows, kept a continuous written journal; some of his notes and papers, by his own account, had been lost in the disasters of the road, including the robbery during the China embassy. He was therefore reconstructing, after a long interval, an enormous and complex experience, and the ordinary failures of human memory, the confusion of dates, the blurring of one place into another, the migration of a story from where it belonged to where it was remembered, must be assumed to run all through the book. Beyond this, the work passed through the hands of a literary editor, Ibn Juzayy, who shaped it, abridged it, and by his own admission added embellishments, and who was responsible for its final form. The Rihla, in short, is not a raw record. It is a memoir, dictated late, edited by another hand, and produced to please a royal patron. It is an extraordinary book, but it is a book with a complicated relationship to the literal truth, and that relationship has been the subject of debate ever since.

Questions of Truth: How Reliable Is the Rihla

The reliability of the Rihla is one of the central problems in the study of Ibn Battuta, and any honest account of his life must face it directly. The difficulty has several layers. The first is the matter of chronology. The dates given in the Rihla, when they are checked against one another and against independently known events, do not always fit together. There are stretches of the narrative, the great northern journey through the Golden Horde and to Constantinople prominent among them, where the time the journey would have required cannot easily be reconciled with the dates the book supplies. Scholars have proposed various solutions, suggesting that certain journeys were shorter than the book implies, or that certain episodes have been displaced in the retelling, and the careful modern editions of the Rihla are full of footnotes wrestling with these tangles.

The second layer of difficulty is the question of whether Ibn Battuta actually went to every place the Rihla describes. Most scholars accept the broad outline of his travels as genuine, the journeys across North Africa, through Egypt and Syria and Arabia, into Iraq and Persia, down the East African coast, across to India and the long Indian residence, and the West African journey to Mali. These are supported by the density and the specificity of the detail, and in many cases by independent confirmation. But certain episodes have attracted real skepticism. The visit to Constantinople, the full extent of the travels within China, a side journey to the region of Bulgharia in the far north, and a few other passages have been doubted, in whole or in part, by serious historians. The suspicion in these cases is that Ibn Battuta may have described, as personal experience, places he reached only in rumor, or that the editor Ibn Juzayy may have filled gaps with material drawn from other sources.

This last point leads to the third and most pointed criticism. It has been shown that some passages of the Rihla closely resemble the work of earlier writers, and in particular that parts of the description of certain cities appear to be drawn, sometimes almost word for word, from the account of an earlier Andalusi traveler. Whether this borrowing was the work of Ibn Battuta himself, padding his recollection with remembered reading, or the work of Ibn Juzayy, supplying polish and completeness as a medieval editor felt free to do, cannot now be determined. Either way, it means that not every sentence presented as eyewitness observation can be taken as such. The Rihla contains, woven together, genuine memory, the distortions of memory, literary convention, the common stock of travelers' marvels, and a measure of outright borrowing.

And yet, when all of these cautions have been entered, the Rihla remains an astonishing and, in its essentials, a deeply valuable historical source. The skeptical scrutiny of generations of scholars has not overturned the central fact of Ibn Battuta's travels; it has refined our understanding of them, identifying the doubtful passages while leaving the great structure standing. For an enormous number of the places Ibn Battuta describes, the wealth and the texture of his detail, the names of officials and scholars, the descriptions of buildings and customs and prices, the small human incidents, are of a kind that a man who had not been there could hardly have invented, and in case after case where his account can be tested against other evidence it holds up well. The Rihla is the single most important description of the fourteenth-century Islamic world by a contemporary who saw it, and for some of the regions it covers, the Swahili coast, the Maldives, the empire of Mali, it is among the very few detailed eyewitness sources that exist at all. It must be read critically. It cannot be read away.

Ibn Battuta as a Witness to His World

If the Rihla is approached as what it is, a great and flawed memoir, it becomes one of the richest windows that survive onto the medieval world, and the things it shows are often things that no other source records with the same intimacy. Ibn Battuta was not a systematic historian or a geographer in the scholarly sense. He was something rarer and, for the social historian, more useful: an enormously well-traveled, observant, and talkative man who noticed daily life. He recorded what people ate and how much it cost. He described their clothes, their houses, their weddings and funerals, their amusements, their manners toward guests and toward one another. He noted the behavior of women in society after society, and his startled comparisons, the secluded women of the Arab cities set against the publicly visible women of the Turkish steppe and the West African savanna, constitute a body of social observation of real value precisely because he was honest enough to record his own surprise.

He was also a witness to the religious life of his world in a way that few other sources match. The Rihla is, among other things, a survey of the variety of Islamic practice across an entire civilization, the Sufi lodges and their shaykhs, the shrines and the tombs of saints, the colleges and the legal schools, the differences of custom between the Maghrib and Egypt and India and the lands of the Turks. Ibn Battuta moved through this religious landscape as a participant, and his account preserves the lived texture of medieval Islam, its piety and its institutions and its internal diversity, with a fullness that the formal religious literature of the period rarely conveys.

And he was a witness to the sheer connectedness of the fourteenth-century world. The single most important thing the Rihla demonstrates, simply by existing, is that the medieval world was not a collection of sealed and isolated regions but a vast, interlinked system across which people, goods, ideas, and faith moved continuously. A man could be born in Morocco and serve as a judge in India and in an Indian Ocean island, could carry the same law and the same language from the Atlantic to the Pacific, could find, in the ports of China, communities of his coreligionists. The career of Ibn Battuta is itself the proof of the proposition, and the Rihla records, city by city and port by port, the network that made that career possible. For the modern study of what historians call the pre-modern world system, the connected economy and culture of medieval Afro-Eurasia, Ibn Battuta is a primary witness of the first importance.

Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo

The comparison between Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo is so frequently made that it deserves to be addressed directly, for it illuminates both men. Marco Polo, the Venetian, traveled to the court of Kublai Khan in the second half of the thirteenth century and produced, after his return, a book describing the lands of the East that became one of the most famous travel narratives in European history. Ibn Battuta traveled a generation or two later, and the two men never met and almost certainly never knew of each other. But because both are remembered as the supreme long-distance travelers of the medieval centuries, they are eternally paired, and the pairing is instructive.

The differences are as important as the resemblance. Marco Polo traveled as a European Christian and a merchant, moving outward from his own civilization into a foreign one, and his book is, in large part, a report on the strange and the marvelous, written for readers to whom the East was almost wholly unknown. Ibn Battuta traveled as a Muslim and a scholar, and for most of his journeys he moved within a single civilization, his own, finding everywhere the institutions, the law, and the faith he had grown up with. His book is less a report on the alien than a survey of the familiar carried out on a heroic scale. In sheer distance, the consensus of historians is that Ibn Battuta traveled farther; his journeys covered a greater total mileage and a greater number of distinct regions than those of any other traveler of the pre-modern age, Marco Polo included. In fame, the balance has historically run the other way, at least in the West, where Marco Polo's name has long been a household word while Ibn Battuta, until recent decades, was known mainly to specialists.

That imbalance of fame is itself worth a moment's reflection, because it has nothing to do with the relative scale of the two men's achievements and everything to do with the accidents of which civilization happened to dominate the writing of world history in the modern period. Marco Polo was claimed by a Europe that went on to global power and that placed its own travelers at the center of the story of exploration. Ibn Battuta belonged to a civilization that, in the centuries after his death, was pushed by that same European expansion toward the margins of the dominant historical narrative. The recovery of Ibn Battuta's reputation, the growing recognition that the greatest traveler of the medieval world was a Muslim from Morocco and not a Christian from Venice, is part of the larger and continuing effort of historians to tell the story of the human past without that distorting bias. Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo are not rivals. They are two witnesses, from two civilizations, to the same surprising truth, that the medieval world was far larger, far richer, and far more connected than later ages assumed.

The Final Years and Death

About the last years of Ibn Battuta's life, after the completion of the Rihla in 1355, very little is known. The book itself, the source of nearly everything else, falls silent once the traveling is done, and the man who had been so vividly present across hundreds of pages slips, at the end, back into the obscurity from which the journeys had raised him. What the scattered evidence suggests is that Ibn Battuta settled in Morocco and that he served, in his final years, as a qadi, a judge, in a Moroccan town, returning at last to the profession of his family and exercising, in a quiet provincial setting, the office he had held in such dramatic circumstances in Delhi and in the Maldives. After a life spent crossing the world, he ended it where he had begun, in his own country, doing the work his father and forefathers had done.

The date of his death is not recorded with certainty, but it is generally placed in the year 1368 or 1369, which would mean that he lived to the age of about sixty-four or sixty-five, having survived by some thirteen or fourteen years the completion of his book and by far longer the great plague that had killed his mother and so many millions of his contemporaries. Some accounts place his death a little later. The place of his burial is likewise uncertain, though it is traditionally associated with his native Tangier, and a site in that city has long been pointed out as his tomb. The uncertainty is, in a way, fitting. The man whose name became a synonym for the act of traveling left, at the end of his road, only the faintest of marks on the records of his homeland, and survives, almost entirely, in the book.

It is worth pausing on the contrast between the obscurity of Ibn Battuta's death and the magnitude of his life. Here was a man who had stood in Mecca and in Constantinople, who had served sultans in India and judged cases in an island kingdom of the Indian Ocean, who had crossed the steppes of Russia and the sands of the Sahara, who had seen the ports of China and the gold of Mali, and who had outtraveled every human being of whom there is record. And he ended as a small-town judge in Morocco, his death unrecorded in any precise way, his grave a matter of tradition rather than of certainty. The journeys were the life. When they were over, and the book that contained them was finished, the world had, in effect, already received everything that Ibn Battuta had to give it.

Legacy and Rediscovery

The afterlife of Ibn Battuta's reputation is a story almost as curious as the travels themselves. Within the Islamic world, the Rihla was known and copied after his death, but it did not become, in the centuries that followed, one of the towering classics of Arabic literature; it circulated, it was abridged, it was read, but it did not occupy a central place in the canon. For a long time the most widely traveled man in history was, even in his own civilization, a somewhat marginal literary figure. In Europe, he was for centuries entirely unknown. The book that the world now treasures spent the better part of five hundred years in relative quiet.

The modern fame of Ibn Battuta began in the nineteenth century, and it began with the manuscripts. European scholars, in the course of the nineteenth century, came upon copies of the Rihla, and in particular a group of manuscripts was acquired in Algeria and brought to France. In the middle of the century, French scholars produced a critical edition of the Arabic text together with a French translation, and this edition made the full Rihla available, for the first time, to the international world of scholarship. From that point the rediscovery gathered pace. Translations into other European languages followed. In the twentieth century, the great English translation, prepared over many years on the basis of the French edition, made Ibn Battuta accessible to a vast new readership, and a series of scholars devoted careers to the study of his text, his routes, and his reliability.

In the decades since, Ibn Battuta has moved steadily from the margins toward the center of how the medieval world is understood and taught. He is now a fixture of world history courses, a standard example of the connectedness of medieval Afro-Eurasia, and the subject of popular books, documentaries, and exhibitions. In the Muslim world and especially in his native Morocco he has become a figure of national and cultural pride, his name attached to institutions, to a great shopping center in Dubai, to a crater on the Moon, and to the romance of travel itself. The phrase the traveler of Islam, with which admirers honored him, has been joined by a simpler modern judgment, frequently repeated: that Ibn Battuta was, by the plain measure of distance covered and ground seen, the greatest traveler of the pre-modern world.

What endures, in the end, is not the contested mileage or the debated chronology but the book and the human being inside it. The Rihla gives us a fourteenth-century world that is vast, various, dangerous, devout, and astonishingly interconnected, and it gives us, moving through that world, a particular and recognizable man: pious and ambitious, curious and vain, brave and sometimes credulous, delighted by generosity, scandalized by impropriety, quick to marry and quick to move on, homesick at the start and never quite able to stop. Ibn Battuta set out from Tangier as a young pilgrim meaning to touch the holy places and return. He came back almost thirty years later having touched, instead, the edges of the known world. The desire that carried him, the long-cherished wish, as he called it at the very beginning, to see the illustrious sanctuaries, had grown, somewhere on the road, into something larger and stranger, a hunger to see the whole of the earth that human beings inhabited. He very nearly did. And because a sultan thought the recollections worth preserving and a young scholar wrote them down, the journey did not vanish with the traveler. Almost seven hundred years later, anyone who opens the Rihla can still set out, in the company of Ibn Battuta, on the longest road that the medieval world afforded, and follow it from the gate of a house in Tangier to the rivers of Mali and the harbors of China and home again.

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