Ibn Battutah
(1304–1368/69), Arab traveler and writer. AbuʿAbd Allah Muhammad ibnʿAbd Allah al-Lawati at-Tanji ibn Battutah, one of the greatest travelers of the Middle Ages, spent thirty years visiting every Muslim country of his day and recorded in accurate detail the social and political life he observed on his journeys. Born in Tangier, a seaport in present-day Morocco in North Africa, he began to travel at the age of twenty-one years, when he made the hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca). On his way he passed through today's Egypt and Syria and returned through Iran and Iraq. On a second journey, he explored southern Arabia, East Africa, and the Persian Gulf.
Ibn Battutah next traveled north to Constantinople and crossed southern Russia, Samarqand (now in Uzbekistan), and Afghanistan to arrive in Delhi, India, around 1333. In 1342, Muhammad ibn Tughluq (c. 1290–1351), the son of the sultan of Delhi, sent him as an envoy to the Chinese emperor. Ibn Battutah reached present-day Beijing via the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean, Ceylon (today's Sri Lanka), and Assam (a state in India) and from the East returned to Fes (Fez) in northern Morocco, thereby crossing half of the Earth. From Fes he went north to al-Andalus (Muslim Spain) in Europe and later traveled south across the Sahara Desert to the Sudan in north central Africa.
Although historians and geographers largely ignored his journals until the late twentieth century, Ibn Battutah is estimated to have traveled about 125,000 kilometers, much farther than Marco Polo (1254–1324) and other medieval travelers, and his observations of the countries he visited are far more detailed and accurate than those of Polo.
David Levinson
Further Reading
Ibn Battuta. (1958–2000) The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354. Trans. with revisions and notes from Arabic text ed. by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti, by H. A. R. Gibb. 5 vols. London and Cambridge, U.K.: Published for the Hakluyt Society by Cambridge University Press.
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