1304 - Circa 1378
Traveler

Journeys to New Places. Ibn Battuta was born in Tangier in 1304. Following a vow he made during his first pilgrimage to Makkah "never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road," he accumulated a wealth of travel experience never duplicated in Islamic history. After spending two or three years in Makkah on his third pilgrimage, he decided that henceforth he would travel for the sake of seeing new peoples and places rather than solely for the sake of piety. After familiarizing himself with all parts of the Islamic Middle East, he set out in 1325 to Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Byzantine Empire, and traveled from there across Central Asia to India, by way of Samarqand. He resided in Delhi at the court of the Muslim ruler Muhammad ibn Tughlaq of northern India for eight years.

Embassy to China. In...