Ibn Battuta Traveled 75,000 Miles and Kept No Notes. How Do You Remember Twenty-Nine Years?

He left Tangier in 1325 a twenty-one-year-old pilgrim bound for Mecca, traded his legal training for patronage across the whole connected length of the Islamic world, lost everything in a storm off Calicut, came home through the Black Death to find both parents dead, and dictated the lot from memory to a court poet who borrowed freely and may have invented chunks of it.

In 1342, a Moroccan jurist stood on the beach at Calicut and watched his life sail away. He had been waiting out the afternoon in a mosque, a courtesy stop on a grander errand: the Sultan of Delhi had made him ambassador to the Yuan court of China and loaded a fleet with two hundred Hindu slaves, singers and dancers, a hundred horses, and great quantities of cloth, dishes, and swords. A storm came up in the night. At dawn one of the great Chinese junks had been driven ashore, and on the sand he could see the mangled bodies of the men who had been carrying the Sultan's present. The other ship, the one with his slave-girls, his servants, and his luggage, had simply spread its sails and left. A slave he had freed took one look at him and walked off. He was left, by his own account, with "the ten dinars that the jugi had given me and the carpet I had used to spread out."

He was thirty-eight years old. He had been gone from Tangier for seventeen years. He had another twelve to go.

The man on the beach was Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji, known to the world as Ibn Battuta. Twenty-nine years of his life and roughly 75,000 miles would go into a single book, and the book is the reason anyone remembers him. The puzzle of that book, and of the life, is the same puzzle the beach at Calicut poses: how do you hold twenty-nine years in your head without writing any of it down?

The pilgrim who would not go home

He started, as so many medieval Maghrebis did, with a pilgrimage. The opening of the Rihla is one of the great sentences in travel literature:

"My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place on Thursday the second of the month of God, Rajab the Unique, in the year seven hundred and twenty-five," that is, 14 June 1325, "with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet." He was twenty-two by the Muslim lunar count, twenty-one and four months by the sun. "I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveller in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests."

His family were qadis, legal scholars of the Maliki school, in a Tangier that was a backwater of the Marinid sultanate. He had, by Ross Dunn's careful estimate, the equivalent of a solid provincial education, not the kind that opens doors in Cairo or Baghdad. What it did give him was a portable profession. In the fourteenth century the Dar al-Islam ran from Morocco to the Strait of Malacca, and a man trained in Islamic law could, in principle, find work and a welcome at any longitude of it. That connectivity was the unnoticed machinery of his whole life.

The hajj was the socially unimpeachable reason to leave. Once he was moving, he kept finding reasons not to stop. In Alexandria, not long after his arrival in April 1326, a pious ascetic named Burhan al-Din heard him say he liked to travel, and handed him a script: he must seek out the ascetic's brothers in India, Sind, and China. A few days later, sleeping on the roof of a hermitage, Ibn Battuta dreamed a great bird carried him to Mecca, then Yemen, then east, then far east, and set him down in a dark green country. The hermit who read the dream told him he would make the pilgrimage, travel through Yemen, Iraq, the land of the Turks, and India, and there meet the ascetic's brother, who would rescue him from danger. "Never since parting from him," Ibn Battuta wrote, "have I met on my journeys aught but good fortune."

He reached Mecca in November 1326, completed the pilgrimage, and then, instead of going home, did something a pilgrim was not supposed to do. He kept walking. As H. A. R. Gibb put it in the foreword to the standard English translation, already on the way through Egypt there appear "the first hints of what, he confesses, was to become his ruling passion, 'to travel through the earth.'" He made it a rule, Gibb adds, "never, so far as possible, to cover a second time any road" he had once travelled. He went north to Iraq and Persia just for the look of the place. Dunn calls the moment bluntly: "He was no longer traveling to fulfill a religious mission or even to reach a particular destination. He was going to Iraq simply for the adventure of it."

The pilgrimage had been the permission. The Dar al-Islam was the passport. What kept him going was something harder to name, an appetite for the next horizon that he never bothered to justify again.

The qadi as passport

By the time he reached India in September 1333, he had become the kind of traveler who could walk into a sultan's court and walk out with a salary. Muhammad bin Tughluq, the Sultan of Delhi, was, by nearly every contemporary account, the wealthiest and most dangerous man in the Muslim world, generous to scholars one week and ordering their executions the next. He made Ibn Battuta the grand qadi of Delhi at twelve thousand dinars a year. For six years the Moroccan jurist lived as a court insider, watching the sultan's purges from a seat close enough to be dangerous, and far enough inside to know that the favor could turn. He wanted out. He had asked to leave on the pretext of another hajj; the sultan refused. Then, in 1341, a Yuan embassy arrived from China, and Tughluq handed Ibn Battuta the perfect exit: lead the return embassy, carry gifts to the emperor, and go.

The embassy is what stranded him on the beach at Calicut. A few days out of Delhi, four thousand Hindu rebels attacked the column. He was separated, chased by ten horsemen, robbed down to his trousers, and held in a cave overnight. He talked his way out by handing over his clothes. He caught up with his party, reached Calicut, and moved the gifts onto Chinese junks. The junk carrying the Sultan's present sank in the night storm, and on the beach at dawn he saw its commander "with his head smashed and his brains scattered," and a second officer with "a nail driven through one of his temples and coming out at the other." The other ship, with his slave-girls and his luggage, and one slave-girl who was carrying his child, sailed on without him. He learned months later that it had been seized by a king in Sumatra; the slave-girl and her child died; the rest of his possessions were taken. He was too ashamed to go back to Delhi, so he went on, alone and broke.

He fetched up in the Maldives, where the court, desperate for a trained jurist, made him chief qadi, married him into the royal family, and refused to let him arrange a boat out. He took three wives. The islands' marriage customs delighted and appalled him in equal measure. "It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the dowries and the pleasures of society which the women offer," he dictated. "When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave they divorce their wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The women of these islands never leave their country." He tried, as qadi, to make the women cover their upper bodies and to stop divorced wives from living in their ex-husbands' houses, and confessed that his authority over the island's women reached only as far as his own wives. After nine months the vizier turned on him, and he fled, divorcing as he went.

There were more shipwrecks. Off Ceylon a storm nearly sank him; the crew cut the mast and built a raft, but there was no room for him, so he spent the night huddled in the bow of a sinking ship until a rescue party appeared at dawn. Then twelve pirate boats attacked and stripped him of the jewels the king of Ceylon had given him, leaving him, again, with nothing but his trousers. He went on to Bengal, Sumatra, and Quanzhou, and he probably did reach China, though the China section is where the doubts cluster. He walked home into the Black Death.

In Damascus, in July 1348, he watched a city try to pray its way out of the plague. The viceroy ordered a three-day fast; amirs, qadis, Jews with their Torah and Christians with their Gospel went out barefoot together to the Mosque of the Footprints, "weeping and supplicating and seeking the favour of God through His Books and His Prophets," and, Ibn Battuta wrote, "God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain two thousand, while in Cairo and Old Cairo it reached the figure of twenty-four thousand a day." In Damascus he learned his father had died fifteen years earlier, and a son he had never met had died at ten. He pushed on to Tangier, and there found that his mother had died a few months before. He had been gone twenty-four years.

A man who has lost his world has two moves. He stayed in Tangier only a few days before leaving for Muslim Spain, and then, still restless, crossed the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali, because he had heard the gold of Mansa Musa was legendary and he wanted to see it. He set out from Sijilmasa on 13 February 1352, rode two months across the desert to Walata, was insulted by a welcoming bowl of millet with a little honey, fell ill for two months in Mali from a bad root, and went home over the Atlas in the dead of winter. "I have seen difficult roads and much snow," he said of the final pass, "but I never saw a road more difficult than that." He reached Fez early in 1354. He was fifty years old, and, for the first time in three decades, done.

The book he did not write

The Sultan of Morocco, Abu Inan Faris, listened to this returned subject, decided the stories were worth keeping, and gave him a job: stay in Fez and dictate. The man assigned to take it down was a young court poet named Ibn Juzayy, whom Ibn Battuta had met years before in a garden in Granada, where, Ibn Juzayy recalled, "Shaykh Abu 'Abdallah delighted us with the story of his travels." The sultan's commission, as Ibn Juzayy recorded it in the introduction, was to "dictate an account of the cities which he had seen in his travel, and of the interesting events which had clung to his memory."

The first problem is that there were no notes. The Rihla is a memoir dictated across roughly two years about twenty-nine years of travel, and the man doing the remembering had not kept a journal. He had names, places, dates, conversations, and the speeches of long-dead kings all stored in a head that had survived fevers, shipwrecks, and the plague. The second problem is that Ibn Juzayy was not a stenographer. He was a court poet with a commission to produce a proper rihla, a recognized Arabic literary genre, and the conventions of the genre permitted, even expected, the stitching in of earlier authorities. Ibn Juzayy said in his introduction that he had "rendered the sense of the narrative" and "frequently reported his words in his own phrasing, without omitting either root or branch," which is an honest description of what a literary editor does.

Modern scholarship has measured the borrowing. About 250 pages of the Rihla, roughly a seventh of the whole, are lifted more or less directly from the twelfth-century Andalusian pilgrim Ibn Jubayr. The Palestine sections were copied, with reordering and trimming, from another thirteenth-century traveler, al-Abdari. The China section is so thin on personal anecdote and so heavy on generic description that some scholars think he never got there at all, or got only as far as the southern ports and absorbed the rest from Muslim traders he met. The trip up the Volga to "Bulghar" is, in places, chronologically impossible. As Dunn puts it, with the patience of a biographer who has lived with the problem for decades: "Even if small parts of the Rihla are fabricated we can never know for sure how to parcel out the blame. It is conceivable that Ibn Juzayy added certain passages without Ibn Battuta even knowing that he did. Nor can we discount the meddling of later copyists." A German scholar, Ralf Elger, has pushed harder, arguing that much of the travel is invented to flatter the sultan, and that contemporaries at the court of Fez, including the great historian Ibn Khaldun, already doubted him. The Dar al-Islam's first pride in the book and the later Arab reluctance to re-examine it are, for Elger, part of the same story.

None of this is a reason to throw the Rihla out. Even the skeptical scholars concede that the India, Maldives, and Mali sections are dense with the kind of detail, the awkward personal incident and the named local, that you do not invent. The shipwreck on the beach at Calicut, the bowls of millet, the boy named Hilal who came to tell him his cabin was too small, these read like a man remembering, badly and out of order, things that actually happened to him. The Rihla is best read the way its editor's note suggests: as oral history, in which Ibn Battuta "is not so much its author as its source."

When Ibn Juzayy finished, he wrote an endnote that is half encomium and half defense. Ibn Battuta, he said, was "the most trustworthy and veracious traveler, the ranger of the earth and traverser of its climes in length and breadth," and "if anyone were to call him 'the traveler of the [entire Muslim] community' he would not exaggerate." Then, almost in the same breath, he admitted that his job had been to render the sense, in adequate language, of what Ibn Battuta had in mind. The book, in other words, was always a collaboration, and the collaborator had his own reasons to make it splendid.

Then the strange part. The Rihla, for roughly four hundred years, was largely ignored. It circulated in abridged manuscript copies in a few libraries; travelers sometimes carried a shortened version as a guide. It was not until the early nineteenth century that a German orientalist, Johann Kosegarten, edited extracts, and an English clergyman, Samuel Lee, produced the first English translation in 1829 from an abridged Arabic manuscript. The full standard Arabic text was only fixed between 1853 and 1858 by the French scholars Defremery and Sanguinetti. The man who had been, in his own time, "the traveler of the age" had to wait for European philology to become one again.

Ibn Battuta himself disappears into that silence. After the dictation, Ibn Juzayy died soon after finishing it, and Ibn Battuta served out his days as a qadi in some unrecorded Moroccan town. He died in 1368 or 1369, around sixty-five, with no known descendants in Morocco. He left one book, written by someone else from a memory nobody could check, about a life nobody had lived before. It is the only book we have, and it is enough.

Read the full life: The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, by Ross E. Dunn (University of California Press, revised edition). For Ibn Battuta's own words, the standard English translation is H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham's four-volume Travels of Ibn Battuta for the Hakluyt Society; Tim Mackintosh-Smith's abridged translation is the one to carry on a train.