A Moroccan scholar left for Mecca at twenty-one and came home thirty years later.
Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69) was the Moroccan traveler whose thirty years of journeys — some 120,000 kilometers from West Africa to China — make him the most traveled individual of the pre-modern world, outpacing even Marco Polo, and whose dictated memoir is the richest eyewitness account of the 14th-century Muslim world.
His dictated memoir, the Rihla (“Travels”), is the single richest eyewitness source on the 14th-century Muslim world: its courts, its trade routes, its plagues and its peoples. He served as a judge in Delhi and an ambassador for sultans, and retired to write it all down in Fez.
Born in Tangier in 1304 to a family of Islamic legal scholars, Ibn Battuta left for the hajj in 1325 intending a sixteen-month round trip. He did not see Morocco again for twenty-four years. Instead he crisscrossed the Dar al-Islam — Egypt, Syria, Persia, Anatolia, the steppes of the Golden Horde, India, the Maldives, Southeast Asia and the coast of China — traveling by caravan, dhow and royal hospitality.
His method was simple: arrive as a learned man, be received by the local sultan, accept a post — usually as qadi, judge — and move on when politics turned dangerous, which it regularly did. He was shipwrecked, robbed, and nearly executed more than once.
His longest stay was in India: eight years as a judge in the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq, the brilliant and terrifying sultan of Delhi, who then sent him as ambassador to China. The mission collapsed in shipwreck and war off the Indian coast; Ibn Battuta pressed on anyway and reached China on his own.
His account of Yuan-dynasty China — its paper money, its great ports, its porcelain — is among the earliest Muslim descriptions of the country. Later, at the sultan of Mali’s request relayed through Fez, he crossed the Sahara to visit the empire of Mansa Musa’s successors, completing the arc of the known Muslim world.
Back in Fez around 1354, the Marinid sultan ordered the young scholar Ibn Juzayy to take down Ibn Battuta’s dictation. The result — formally “A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling” — runs to hundreds of pages of courts, customs, prices, foods and miracles.
Medieval readers found some of it hard to believe, and modern scholars have caught him borrowing from earlier travelers. But the core is verified again and again by independent sources: no one else saw so much of the 14th-century world and lived to dictate it.
