Ibn Battuta

About this figure

Ibn Battuta (1304-1368/1369) was a Moroccan Muslim scholar whose decades of travel across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia made him, by most estimates, the most widely traveled individual of the pre-modern world. Born in Tangier into a family of Islamic legal scholars, he set out in 1325 at the age of twenty-one to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, a journey that, rather than concluding with the hajj, became the beginning of nearly thirty years of continuous travel. Over the following decades he journeyed through North and West Africa, Egypt, Arabia, Persia, and the Byzantine world; served for a period as a judge, or qadi, in the Delhi Sultanate under Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq; traveled on through South and Southeast Asia; and reportedly reached as far as China before eventually returning to Morocco. Estimates of the total distance he covered run to roughly seventy-five thousand miles, well beyond the travels of his approximate contemporary, the Venetian Marco Polo.

Late in his life, at the request of the Marinid sultan of Morocco, Ibn Battuta dictated an account of his journeys to a court scholar, Ibn Juzayy, who compiled and, in places, embellished it into the work known as the "Rihla," or "Journey," a title later rendered in English translation as "The Travels of Ibn Battuta." The work records not only the geography and rulers he encountered but also extensive detail on Islamic legal and religious practice across the diverse societies he visited, reflecting his training as a jurist. As with Marco Polo's account, some episodes in the Rihla, particularly the more remote Asian travels, have been questioned by modern scholars as possibly drawn from earlier accounts rather than firsthand experience, though the work as a whole is regarded as an invaluable source on the fourteenth-century Islamic world. Details of Ibn Battuta's final years are sparse; he is generally believed to have died in Morocco, likely in Marrakesh, in 1368 or 1369, though the precise date is not firmly established.

Written by Epoch Voices. Not the figure’s own words.