Africa (14th – mid-15th c.)Travel and discovery

The travels of Ibn Battuta

On 14 June 1325 the 21-year-old Ibn Battuta left Tangier on pilgrimage to Mecca, and he did not settle again in Morocco until 1354. In those three decades he travelled through Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Iraq and Iran, down the Swahili coast, across Anatolia, the Golden Horde and Central Asia to India, where he served the sultan of Delhi, on to the Maldives, Sumatra and — by his account — China, and finally across the Sahara to Mali. His dictated Rihla is a unique panorama of the 14th-century world.

Date: 14 June 1325 – between January and February 1354start: exact date; end: exact date unknown: an interval is given · duration: ≈ 29 yearsDate in the Julian calendar
Place: Feztoday: Fez, Morocco · Africa
Route: Tangier → Tunis → Alexandria → Cairo → Damascus → Mecca → Baghdad → Tabriz → Mecca → Aden → Mogadishu → Kilwa Kisiwani → Hormuz → Mecca → Sinop → Astrakhan → Constantinople → Urgench → Bukhara → Samarkand → Delhi → Calicut → Malé, Maldives → Adam’s Peak, Ceylon → Chittagong → Samudra Pasai → Quanzhou (Zaitun) → Calicut → Hormuz → Baghdad → Damascus → Cairo → Mecca → Cairo → Tunis → Fez → Granada → Marrakesh → Fez → Sijilmasa → Taghaza → Walata → Niani (traditional site of Mali’s capital) → Timbuktu → Gao → Takedda → Sijilmasa → Fez
Participants: Ibn Battuta
Threads: Africa (14th – mid-15th c.)
Also known as: Rihla; Tuhfat al-nuzzar; A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities; Рихла; Подарок созерцающим о диковинках городов и чудесах странствий

He reached Alexandria on 5 April 1326 and Damascus on 9 August, made his first hajj that autumn and in 1327 visited Iraq and Iran, travelling for a time with the camp of the Ilkhan Abu Sa’id. After a stay in Mecca he sailed down the Red Sea and along the coast of East Africa to Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa (in 1331 by his own dating, perhaps as early as 1329; the chronology of these years is uncertain), returned by way of Oman and the Persian Gulf, and then took the overland road to India: through Anatolia, across the Black Sea to the Golden Horde of Özbeg Khan, to Constantinople in the suite of a Byzantine princess, and through Khwarazm, Bukhara and Afghanistan to the Indus, which by his reckoning he reached on 12 September 1333. For years he served Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi as a qadi. Sent in 1341 (1342 by the Rihla) with an embassy to the Yuan emperor, he lost his ships in a storm at Calicut, spent about nine months in the Maldives, where he served as qadi, visited Ceylon, Bengal and Samudra Pasai in Sumatra, and reached Quanzhou in China in 1345. On the way back he found Syria and Egypt in the grip of the Black Death in 1348, made his last hajj and reached Fez on 13 November 1349. After a journey to Granada he crossed the Sahara from Sijilmasa in February 1352 by way of the salt mines of Taghaza and Walata, stayed from late June 1352 to February 1353 at the court of Mansa Sulayman of Mali, went on to Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda and, recalled by the Marinid sultan Abu Inan, was back in Fez early in 1354.

At Abu Inan’s request he dictated his memories to the scholar Ibn Juzayy, who finished the text on 9 December 1355. There is no evidence that Ibn Battuta kept a journal, and Ibn Juzayy silently borrowed descriptions from earlier travellers, notably Ibn Jubayr; modern scholars doubt some of the journeys — up the Volga to Bulghar, to Sana’a, parts of the tour of Anatolia — and some question whether he reached China at all. Even at the Marinid court his tales of India were thought incredible, as Ibn Khaldun recalls. Still, the Rihla remains an incomparable source for the Islamic world and its neighbours in the 14th century. The event is placed at Fez, where the journey ended; the route on the map is simplified.

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Pax Mongolicac. 1250 – c. 1350 · Central and Northern AsiaIbn Battuta crossed the lands of the Golden Horde, the Chagatai khans and Yuan China in the last decades of the Mongol peace
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Third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad: the height of the Mamluk sultanateMarch 1310 – 7 June 1341 · Middle East and EgyptIn 1326 Ibn Battuta passed through Mamluk Egypt and Syria in the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad
Muhammad bin Tughluq moves the capital to Daulatabadbetween 1326 and 1327 · South AsiaIbn Battuta, who reached Delhi in 1334 and served the sultan as a qadi, left one of the three contemporary accounts of the transfer
Ibn Taymiyya dies in the Citadel of Damascus26 September 1328 · Middle East and EgyptIbn Battuta claimed to have heard Ibn Taymiyya preach in Damascus in 1326, when Ibn Taymiyya was already in prison
Death of Abu Sa’id and the break-up of the Ilkhanatebetween 30 November and 1 December 1335 · Middle East and EgyptIbn Battuta travelled with Abu Sa’id’s camp in 1327; returning twenty years later, he marvelled at how quickly the Ilkhanate had dissolved
Black Death in Cairo and Damascus1347–1349 · Middle East and EgyptIn 1348 Ibn Battuta witnessed the plague in Syria and Egypt and the procession of prayer in Damascus
Ibn Khaldun writes the Muqaddimah1377 · AfricaIn the Muqaddimah Ibn Khaldun recalls how courtiers of Abu Inan in Fez took Ibn Battuta’s tales of India for lies, and how the vizier warned him not to reject them