Illustration by Ibn Battuta.
Marco Polo covered three times less distance than the traveler Battuta covered. “He left the nest like a bird” and almost 30 years of travel followed.
One of the most extraordinary figures in the history of travel was born on this day, 722 years ago.
From Tangier, a northern Moroccan city with a Portuguese footprint, Ibn Battuta For almost 30 years (between 1325 and 1354), he crossed deserts, seas and large urban centers — from North Africa to China, from Russia to India, on foot, by camel and by sea.
Moved by faith and curiosity, Ibn left his city at the age of 21 to complete the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the pillars of Islam, but also to deepen his legal studies in Egypt and Syria, recalls this week. He himself described this moment as a profound break with his previous life.
“I decided to abandon my friends and left my homeland like birds leaving their nest”, in Rehla, the account of his great journey.
That first departure turned into a lifetime of travel. He would only return many years later, already over 45 years old, and even then he would still leave again, towards al-Andalus and south of the Sahara.
Ibn Battuta will have traveled more than 120 thousand kilometers and known more than 1,500 people. His itinerary covered an extraordinary area for the time: North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the east coast of Africa, Russia, Central Asia, India, Maldives, Ceylon (currently Sri Lanka), Southeast Asia and China, as well as western regions such as the kingdoms of Aragon and Granada.
But interestingly, relatively little is known about his personal life beyond what he himself says. Rehla is the main source about its existence. Battuta mentions having made pilgrimages to Mecca four times and mentions marriages and divorces that occurred along the journeys, but is vague on details regarding childhood, family, or early training. It is known, however, that he had Islamic legal knowledge, inherited in part from family tradition, which allowed him to act as a judge and alfaqui in several of the places he visited.
In the first phase of the trip, he was amazed by cities such as: “This city is a resplendent and luminous pearl, a dazzling maiden with her adornments…”. It passed through Cairo, went up the Nile, crossed Sinai and continued on to Palestine and Syria, finally arriving in Mecca in 1326.
From Mecca, far from over, the adventure continued through Iraq and Iran, passing through cities such as Baghdad, Basra and Tabriz, and then returned to the holy city, where it would have stayed for three years. From there he set out on new routes, including Yemen, Oman, the east African coast and the Persian Gulf. She talks about landscapes, farming methods, religious practices and local customs with an attention that makes Rehla a very valuable historical source.
One of the reasons for this descriptive richness was his unusual memory and ability to collect stories, episodes and impressions practically everywhere he went. Battuta recorded miracles, anecdotes, eating habits, forms of government, signs of hospitality.
On some occasions, he was received in palaces by sultans and cadis impressed by his reputation as a traveler; he also slept in lodgings, hermitages and Muslim shelters — from luxury to precariousness, from precariousness to luxury.
Battuta also took an active role in the societies he visited. Sometimes he acted like a kind of missionarypromoting the Islamic faith, and exercised judicial functionssupported by his knowledge of law.
In certain cases, he even participated in law enforcement, such as when reports having had a thief’s hand amputated in India.
His travels took him to other extreme scenarios and situations that, today, sound almost legendary. In the steppe region and the Tatar world, he described the habits of horsemen who drank the blood of their own horses in motion; still in India, he watched with horror the cremation of a man whose widow threw herself on the funeral pyre, in a ritual of loyalty and honor; in northeastern Russia, he traveled to the so-called “Land of Darkness”, associated with the fur trade; in the Maldives, points out that he had four women, in addition to the slaves […] for the year and a half I was there.”
In other regions of Asia, such as Ceylon and Java, he is attentive to exotic flora and local beliefs, including legends about Mount Sarandib and descriptions of animals and practices that surprised or shocked him. For example, he saw a rhinoceros for the first time in India and collected strange stories about flying leeches and monkeys that “dialogued”.
But not everything was a bed of roses. Ibn Battuta suffered hunger and thirst, suffered illnessesfaced storms and narrowly escaped death several times. It was attacked by Hindu rebels, lost ships in shipwrecks, was robbed by pirates and faced very severe environmental conditions in the lands of the Golden Horde.
When describing the Russian winter, she says that there were so many clothes that she needed help putting them together. It also mentions multiple episodes of illness, such as fevers, diarrhea and poisoning.
Its passage through regions marked by Mongolian heritage was also documented. In them, he blames Genghis Khan and his descendants for the trail of destruction he left.
Despite so much contact with other cultures, interestingly, his vision remained deeply anchored in Islamic morality. He judged other people’s customs in light of the Qur’an and criticized practices he considered deviant, such as women’s partial nudity.
Upon returning to Morocco in the mid-1350s, he was tasked by the Sultan of Fez, Abu Inan, with putting his experiences into writing. The result was the work with a long title: “Gift for those who contemplate the surprising things of cities and the wonders of travel”which tradition summarized as Rehla.
Ibn Battuta dictated the text to Ibn Yuzayy, a poet of Granadawhich added literary quotes, poems, and possibly some imaginative elements. Furthermore, the traveler he no longer had his notebookwhich he had lost in Bukhara, which forced him to reconstruct past episodes based on memory.
Still, the historical value of the record is immense, highlights National Geographic. Few texts offer such a broad and vivid vision of the fourteenth-century Afro-Eurasian world, especially of the Islamic space in full vitality.
As far as is known, Ibn Battuta did not pass through Portuguese territory when he was in al-Andalus. But he crossed from Ceuta with the intention of participating in the defense of the border (jihad), at a time when there was a Castilian threat over Gibraltar. From Gibraltar, to reach Granada, he passed through (and described) Ronda, Marbella and Málaga.
