Ibn Battuta Biography

Ibn Battuta

(Abu Abd Allah Muhammas Ibn Battuta; Tangier, 1304-Fez, 1368 or 1377) Arab traveler and geographer.He was the most important of the Muslim travelers in the Middle Ages, famous for writing the book Rihläh (Travels), in 1355, where he captured in great detail the experiences lived throughout the ages.more than 120,000 kilometers that he traveled from 1325 to 1355.

Ibn Battuta

The work, translated in the West under the name of Through Islam , it constitutes an invaluable source of first-hand information on the history and geography of the Muslim world during the Middle Ages, as well as being in its time one of the few reliable references to territories unknown by almost the entire inhabited world, although it must also be said that the work contains many geographical errors and quite a few passages with little credibility, since the narrative has a high literary and artistic degree, where the author's desire to please the reader with wonderful stories and tales to the use of the time.Ibn Battuta was a direct witness to one of the greatest convulsions that devastated the Middle Ages: the Black Death of the year 1348, which reached him when he was in Syria, and whose catastrophic effects he described in detail.

Member of An honorable family dedicated to the Islamic magistracy (qadis), from a very young age Ibn Battuta was fond of reading, especially of works related to geography and with all kinds of travel books.Helped by the economic relief of his family, when he was only twenty-one years old, Ibn Battuta began his traveling journey.On June 13, 1325, he set out in the direction of Mecca with the design of fulfilling the mandatory pilgrimage for all Muslims to visit the holy city par excellence of Islam.

Ibn Battuta traveled all over North Africa along the coastline, where he barely paused his attention, until he reached Alexandria.From Egypt, he went up the Nile to the city of Aydab, located at the height of the first waterfalls, and then returned to Cairo due to the impossibility of embarking to Arabia crossing the Red Sea, as was his wish.Next, Ibn Battuta visited Damascus and Aleppo, after which he took the direct route to Mecca, where he arrived in September 1326.The following month, Ibn Battuta left Mecca to continue his itinerary through the holy places of the Islam, Meshed and the tomb of Saint Ali al-Rida.

Once he had fulfilled his wishes as a devotee, he went to Iraq, Khuzistan, Fars, Tabiz and Kurdistan to end up in Baghdad, from where, in 1327, he returned to Mecca to live three years in a row as a professor of theology, a period in which he gained a reputation as an austere and devout Muslim.When the traveling spirit returned to seize Ibn Battuta, he undertook the journey, this time to Kilwa.From that city he returned to Arabia via Oman and the Gulf, fulfilling a new pilgrimage to Mecca, in the year 1332.

Travels of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta

After visiting Arabia in depth, Ibn Battuta really began his great journey that was to take him to the very heart of the Chinese empire.From Mecca Ibn Battuta traveled to Egypt, Syria, and the Anatolian peninsula.In the coastal city of Sinope he embarked for the Crimea and Jaffa (present-day Feodosia), an important commercial factory in Genoa, where he made contact for the first time with Western Christian culture.Once in Constantinople, after a short stay in the Byzantine capital, he went to the territories dominated by the Golden Horde and the Qiptaq Tatars, where the khan, according to his own account, received him with impressive luxury and made him the honor of sharing several of their official wives.

Ibn Battuta turned his attention to the mysterious lands of the north, reaching the frozen steppes where the ermine and sable furs were obtained so highly valued by royalty and high European nobility.Finally, moved by a gentlemanly gesture of gratitude typical of Muslims, Ibn Battuta agreed to accompany one of the khan's wives to Constantinople, bordering the Black Sea coast, a city where he was also the object of a welcome worthy of a king.by the Byzantine emperor Andronicus III Palaiologos.

Back at the khan's court, Ibn Battuta prepared himself thoroughly for his next journey, the longest and most lasting of them all.Crossing the Volga River and the Aralocaspian steppes, on September 13, 1333, he reached the fertile Indus Valley, heading for Delhi, a city where he spent nine long years in the service of Sultan Muhammad Ibn Tughluq.Although Ibn Battuta prospered and achieved the highest honors in the luxurious court of the Hindu Sultan, his desire to see the world and the desire for adventure in his blood overcame the comfort he enjoyed at the time.Finally, eager to abandon a sedentary and very comfortable life but full of intrigues, responsibilities and envies everywhere, in the year 1342 the Hindu Sultan appointed him ambassador of his kingdom in the easternmost territories of the continent.

His journey to the Far East began by visiting the Maldives islands for a year and a half, where Ibn Battuta's small expedition had to call in as a result of a terrible hurricane that destroyed all the boats.Ibn Battuta rested in a truly paradisiacal place, where he acted as a judge thanks to his studies in Theology.Once he was able to set sail, Ibn Battuta reached Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), where he climbed the famous mountain that according to legend contained the footprints of Adam, the first man of humanity.After being looted by the Indian pirates, Ibn Battuta was forced to return to Calcutta stopping in Bengal, Assam and Sumatra, in whose kingdom the Muslim Sultan provided him with a boat made of reeds with which he could finally reach the Chinese coast.

After a long and painful cabotage navigation, Ibn Battuta landed in Zaitón (a city identified by specialists with some reservations as the current Chuanchou, near Amoy, in the Fujián region), carrying out numerous tours of that immense country until reaching the capital Beijing, where he barely covered a month, to continue his explorations.Precisely, according to the experts on the author and his work, this passage of the Rihläh is the least true and the one that raises the most suspicions that it was an extract added by an apocryphal, due to the change in narrative style so substantial and the large number of inaccuracies and errors it contains, in contrast to the previous reliability of the story.Ibn Battuta probably never saw Beijing or the famous Chinese Wall.

However, Ibn Battuta left great written information about that period.Ibn Battuta was pleasantly surprised by such a strange civilization and its great festivals.He also neatly described the workings of a meticulous and efficient administration, exemplary justice, and a complex economy, all details to which a person like him, brought up under such different intellectual, social and religious parameters, was not used.

As a consequence of the serious political upheavals that shook China in 1347, Ibn Battuta began his return to the West earlier than desired, through Sumatra and Malabar to Egypt, from where he went to La Mecca for another pilgrimage.Already in Alexandria, without any setback, they embarked for Tunisia aboard a Catalan ship that transferred them to Sardinia (at that time belonging to the Crown of Aragon), until, finally, it crosses western Algeria and enters the kingdom of Morocco, heading to the capital of the Meriní kingdom, the flourishing Fez, where he was received as a national hero by the Sultan himself, in November 1349.

Ibn Battuta en received by Mohammed ibn Tughliq

Barely savoring the honeys of his adventures and exploits among his compatriots, Ibn Battuta was commissioned by the Sultan to make another trip of much smaller scope than the previous ones but no less important for that , especially for later generations, since he was commissioned to explore a part of the unknown territories inhabited by blacks that were hardly known at that time.We are referring to the semi-legendary African empire of Mali, on which Ibn Battuta gave a fulfilled geographical, political, social and religious in the Rihläh .

But before leaving for Western Sahara, Ibn Battuta was sent as the Sultan's ambassador to the Muslim kingdom of Granada, where he remained for a year or so, between 1351 and 1352.Back in Morocco , Ibn Battuta informed his sultan in detail of the delicate political situation that the last remaining Muslim kingdom was going through in the extreme western part of the European continent, constantly threatened by the Castilian monarch Pedro I the Cruel.

In the year 1352, Ibn Battuta left Sijilmassa, a city that was in its golden age, nicknamed the "gate of the desert", at the head of a caravan of merchants, with which he managed to cross the Sahara desert in the direction of north-south in just two months, a period in which he was able to study in depth the main mechanisms that governed the lucrative commercial traffic of the region: the exchange of the salt of Taghasa and the gold of the Sudan.Contact with the black Muslim world at the court of the Sultan of Mali, Mansa Suleyman, owner of the powerful and feared Empire of Mali, completely disappointed Ibn Battuta, used to the splendor of the East.The simplicity of these people when interpreting Islam and the cases of cannibalism that Ibn Battuta could see with his own eyes, ended up forcing him to resume the brand a year after his stay in Mali.

After reaching the Niger, which he believed to be a tributary of the Nile, Ibn Battuta descended its channel until he reached the towns of Timbuktu and Gao, after which he reached the city of Taccada (current Agadés ), the southernmost point that the white man had reached in the western part of the African continent.At the end of 1353, Ibn Battuta returned to Sijilmassa via the Aïr and the harsh Ahaggar, in the middle of the Sahara desert.

Back in Fez, Ibn Battuta dedicated the rest of his life to practicing as a qadi.In 1355, the Meriní sultan ordered him to collect in writing all his travels since 1325, work for which he had the collaboration of the Granada writer Ibn Yuzayy, who dedicated three months before dying to the complete writing of the book following the dictations that Ibn Battuta was giving him.This practice of dictating (and acknowledging that it has been done) did not mean any disgrace for the author, but rather the opposite, since it was very common in Europe and in Muslim literary culture.Without going any further, Marco Polo himself probably dictated his adventures to Master Rustichello of Pisa, as did the colonizer and discoverer Cabeza de Vaca two centuries later with his work Comments , among many other examples..

Precisely, the fact that the work was written by a very notable writer and even a better poet such as Ibn Yuzayy from Granada, makes it appear too many naked and cold stories along with others.much more elaborate, where Ibn Yuzayy is seen to have made great efforts to demonstrate to everyone his great erudition and his literary art full of all kinds of stylistic flourishes.

To this asymmetry in style must be added the fact that Ibn Yuzayy imaginatively reconstructed itineraries of Ibn Battuta's trip, it is not known without his consent or not, grouping them, cutting them or stretching them to confer a linear order to the story, a practice that led him to commit a host of quite serious geographical and chronological errors, as is suspected to have happened when the book recounts Ibn Battuta's wanderings in and around Beijing.All these questions have led specialists to doubt the credibility of what Ibn Battuta has said.

In any case, there is no doubt about the great importance and quality of Ibn's work.Battuta by herself, as well as her traveling journey, impressive and with undeniable notes of heroism considering how and when she did it.With the ultimate aim of providing the sultan with information difficult to acquire at the time, Ibn Battuta collected historical, geographical, folkloric and ethnographic data at the same time that he narrated the pilgrim or daily customs, wonderful events and legendary events of the places where he passed, affirming above all the omnipresence of Islam as a way of life and understanding of the world.In the work there are also references to the internal conflicts of Islam and its various sects, as well as detailed descriptions of Muslim rites.