1145-1217
Pilgrim

Journey to Makkah. Ibn Jubayr produced one of the earliest and most influential accounts of a pilgrimage to Makkah. He left Granada in his native Spain in February 1183, embarking at Ceuta on a Genoese ship that over a month-long period took him to Alexandria via Sardinia, Sicily, and Crete, all non-Muslim lands. After making the pilgrimage, he went to Baghdad, the then-declining metropolis of the Abbasid khilafah, and then took the caravan route across Syria from Mosul to Aleppo eventually reaching the Mediterranean coast at Acre. Once again boarding a Genoese ship, he endured a harrowing shipwreck off Sicily before finally returning to Spain in yet another ship in April 1185. He made further voyages in later years, dying during a sojourn in Alexandria in 1217. His description of his first journey, Rihla Ibn Jubayr (Travel Account of Ibn Jubayr), is the only one to survive...