The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  With this event, the first part of the Rihla comes to an end, signifying an important transition in Ibn Battuta’s career. During the three years between his departure from Mecca and his arrival at the banks of the Indus, he had become, with his slaves, his horses, and his pack train of expensive accoutrements, a traveler of considerable private means — but a traveler nonetheless. Except for his service as caravan qadi on the road between Tunis and Alexandria, he had never had any sustained employment in legal scholarship. Now, however, he was about to seek an official career. Word had gone round the mosques and madrasas of Islamdom that fortune and power were to be had in service to Muhammad Tughluq and the court of Delhi. The Rihla explains:

  The king of India . . . makes a practice of honoring strangers and showing affection to them and singling them out for governorships or high dignities of state. The majority of his courtiers, palace officials, ministers of state, judges, and relatives by marriage are foreigners, and he has issued a decree that foreigners are to be called in his country by the title of ’Aziz (Honorable), so that this has become a proper name for them.

  Gentleman, pilgrim, jurist, raconteur, world traveler, and guest of amirs and khans, Ibn Battuta had good reason to think he was just the sort of public servant Muhammad Tughluq was looking for.

  Notes

  1. William Woodville Rockhill (trans. and ed.). The Journey of William of Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World (London, 1900), p. 94.

  2. “Rumi” is usually to be translated as “Greeks,” but at other points in the narrative IB uses the term when he means Genoese. See Gb, vol. 2, p. 467n.

  3. W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-âge, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1936), vol. 2, pp. 172–74.

  4. IB associates a visit to Sudak with his later trip from Astrakhan to Constantinople. Other than inserting Sudak into the itinerary, he says nothing about a detour into the Crimea. More plausibly, IB passed through Sudak on his way from Kaffa to al-Qiram. See Gb, vol. 2, p. 499n and Hr, pp. 470, 478–79.

  5. B. D. Grekov and A. J. Iakubovskij, La Horde d’Or, trans. F. Thuret (Paris, 1939), p. 91.

  6. Rockhill, William of Rubruck, p. 49.

  7. Ibid., p. 57. Marco Polo also describes the wagons. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Henry Yule, 2 vols., 3rd edn, rev. Henri Cordier (London, 1929), vol. 1, pp. 252–55.

  8. The caravan might conceivably have crossed the Kerch Strait east of al-Qiram, then approached Azaq from the south. Some topographical hints in the Rihla, however, argue for the northern route. Hr, pp. 470–71.

  9. Rockhill, William of Rubruck, pp. 67, 85.

  10. Ozbeg led unsuccessful invasions of Ilkhanid territory in 1319, 1325, and 1335. J. A. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political History of the Ilkhans” in The Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, England, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 408, 412–13; Bertold Spuler, Die Goldene Horde (Leipzig, 1943), pp. 93–96.

  11. IB states that he arrived at Bish Dagh on 1 Ramadan, which was 27 May 1332 or 6 May 1334.

  12. At this point in the narrative IB claims to have made a journey, all within the month of Ramadan, from Ozbeg’s camp to the middle Volga city of Bulghar and back again, a total distance of more than 800 miles. Stephen Janicsek has argued convincingly that this trip never took place. “Ibn Battuta’s Journey to Bulghar: Is it a Fabrication?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (October 1929), pp. 791–800. Janiscek shows that IB’s cursory description of both Bulghar and the Land of Darkness beyond (to which he does not claim to have gone but only heard about) are based on earlier geographical writings in Arabic. He also points out that IB could not possibly have made the journey in anywhere near the time he allots to it and that he says virtually nothing about his route, his companions, his personal experiences, or the sights he would have seen along the way. The Bulghar trip is the only section of the Rihla whose falsity has been proven beyond almost any doubt, though the veracity of some other journeys may be suspected, such as the trip to San’a in the Yemen. We must remember, however, that the Rihla was composed as a literary survey of the Islamic world in the fourteenth century. It was well known among literate Muslims that Bulghar was the most northerly of Muslim communities. Moreover, several medieval geographers wrote in fascination about the frigid Land of Darkness, that is, Siberia. If IB did not go to Bulghar, he might nonetheless satisfy his readers’ expectations of a book about travels through the Dar al-Islam by saying that he did. Scholars of the Rihla are generally in agreement that the Bulghar detour is a fiction. Gb, vol. 2, p. 491n and Hr, pp. 471–73. Also, because of IB’s rich and detailed description of life in Ozbeg’s ordu, we may suppose that he remained there throughout Ramadan 1332 (1334).

  13. A letter addressed from one Byzantine monk to another and dated 1341 has confirmed that at that time a daughter of Andronicus III was married to Ozbeg Khan. R. J. Loenertz, “Dix huit lettres de Gregoire Acindyne, analysées et datées.” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 23 (1957): 123–24; also Hr, pp. 474–76. “Bayalun” is a Mongol name, not a Greek one. Paul Pelliot, Notes sur l’histoire de la Horde d’Or (Paris, 1949), pp. 83–84.

  14. Mehmed Izzeddin, “Ibn Battouta et la topographie byzantine,” Actes du VI Congrès Internationale des Études Byzantines, 2 vols. (Paris, 1951), vol. 2, p. 194.

  15. IB’s reporting of his itinerary from Astrakhan to Constantinople is blurry and confused. There is, however, no reason to doubt that he and the princess traveled by way of the northern and western shores of the Black Sea. See Gb, vol, pp. 498–503n; and Hr, pp. 476–79.

  16. Gb, vol. 2, p. 500n. The complexities of IB’s itinerary along the western rim of the Black Sea are analyzed in H. T. Norris, “Fact or Fantasy in Ibn Battuta’s Journey along the Northern Shores of the Black Sea,” in Ibn Battuta: Actes du Colloque international organizé par l’Ecole Supérieure Roi Fahd de Traduction à Tanger les 27, 27, 29 octobre 1993 (Tangier, 1996), pp. 11–24; and “Ibn Battuta’s journey in the north-eastern Balkans,” Journal of Islamic Studies 5, 2 (1994): 209–220.

  17. IB presents detailed vivid, and generally accurate descriptions of the Byzantine court and the city’s important buildings. The account, however, is also muddled by errors, puzzling observations, and impossible stories. He informs us, for example, that the Latin Pope made an annual visit to Constantinople! The supposed meeting with the ex-emperor Andronicus II (whom IB calls George, when his monastic name was Antonius) is only the most egregious of his misunderstandings. Hrbek (Hr, p. 481) believes that IB had a meeting with someone important but fabricated his identity in order “to add a further item to his collection of personal acquaintances with sovereigns.” Neither Gibb nor Hrbek believe that the itinerary can be rearranged to place IB in Constantinople before February 1332.

  18. According to the letter of Gregoire Acindyne, she was with Ozbeg in 1341. See note 13.

  19. Hr, p. 477.

  20. Ibid., p. 482.

  21. Scholars formerly believed that both Old and New Saray were founded in the thirteenth century, the one by Batu, the other by his brother Berke. But recent numismatic evidence suggests that Ozbeg not only made his capital at New Saray but founded the city as well.

  22. On this scholar, Grekov and Iakubovskij. La Horde d’Or, pp. 157–58.

  23. IB’s journey through Khurasan is doubtful. His itinerary is confusing and his description almost devoid of personal details. He mentions only one stopover between Bistam in the western part of Khurasan and Qunduz in northern Afghanistan, the straight line distance between them being more than 700 miles. He would also have had to undertake this excursion at top speed in order to sandwich it into his own chronological scheme. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 534) believes that this section of the narrative is “highly suspect” but offers no case. Most of the descriptive material is taken up with an account of the popular rebellion that gave rise to the Sarbadar state, one of the kingdoms that seized a share of greater Persia following the collapse of the Ilkhanate in 1335. The revolt began in 1336. IB was in India by that time and does not cl
aim to have witnessed any of the events he describes. See J. M. Smith, Jr., The History of the Sarbadar Dynasty 1336–1381 A. D. (The Hague, 1970).

  24. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 531) proposes that IB crossed the Hindu Kush at the Khawak Pass about the end of June. IB’s reference to snow and cold weather in the pass, however, suggests a month no later than May. See J. Humlum, La géographie de l’Afghanistan (Copenhagen, 1959). The Arabic passage of the Rihla Gibb translates “we stayed on the northern side of the Hindu Kush until the warm weather had definitely set in” may be rendered “until the warm weather had begun to set in.” D&S, vol. 3, p. 84.

  25. IB’s route from Kabul to the Indus is a puzzle owing to the uncertain identity of several place names as well as his failure to say precisely where he reached the river. Gibb, Mahdi Husain, and Peter Jackson have analyzed the problem and each arrives at a different conclusion. The issue pivots on the identity of “Shashnagar,” which IB claims to have passed through on his road from Kabul to the river. If this locality is Hashtnagar, a district near Peshawar (in northern Pakistan), IB is likely to have crossed the Sulayman Mountains through the Khyber Pass. MH, pp. 1–2. If, however, it is to be identified with Naghar, a place south of Kabul, he probably entered the Indus plain in the Bannu (Banian) district about 100 miles south of Peshawar. Peter Jackson, “The Mongols and India (1221–1351)”, Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, p. 224. To complicate the problem further IB tells us that he spent 15 nights crossing a “great desert.” Gibb (Gb, vol.3, p. 591n) believes that he probably traveled through the desert south of Ghazna and reached the Indus in the Larkana district of Sind, that is, less than 300 miles from the mouth of the river.

  26. IB’s statement that he arrived at the Indus River on 1 Muharram 734 (12 September 1333) is probably more or less accurate. The date is open to question, however, since he claims to have left Mecca at the end of 732 A.H. (12 September 1332), yet he took about three years traveling from there to India. Therefore, one date or the other must be wrong, and if the Mecca departure date is correct he would not have reached India until the autumn of 1335. (See Chapter 6, note 2 for a fuller discussion of this issue.) On the whole, the indications that he crossed the Indus by the autumn of 1333 are more compelling than the arguments supporting his departure from Arabia in 1332. The evidence for the 1333 arrival may be summarized as follows:

  (a) IB reports events surrounding the departure of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq from Delhi in order to suppress a rebellion in Ma’bar in the far south of India (see Chapter 9). The revolt broke out in 1334. IB states that the sultan left the capital on 9 Jumada I, which was 5 January in 1335 (see Chapter 9, note 21). IB had clearly been living in the capital for some time when this event occurred. If the dating here is correct, he must have entered India in 1333, or at least many months before the fall of 1335.

  (b) Muslim medieval sources date the deposition and death of Tarmashirin, Khan of Chagatay, in 1334–35 (735 A.H.). IB states that he heard about the khan’s being overthrown “two years” after his arrival in India (Gb, vol. 3, p. 560). This would accord with IB’s having visited the ruler’s camp in the late winter of 1333. If he had been there in 1335, that is, very shortly before Tarmashirin was overthrown, he would likely have heard the news within a short time of reaching India, not two years.

  (c) Passing through Ajodhan (Ajudahan) on his way from the Indus to Delhi, IB recounts that he met the holy man Farid al-Din al-Badhawuni. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 20) explains that no shaykh of that name existed at that time and that IB must have been referring to his grandson ’Alam al-Din Mawj-Darya. Mahdi Husain also notes that this latter personage died in 734 A.H. Assuming Mahdi Husain is right on the question of the saint’s identity, then IB must have crossed the Indus no later than that year. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 529n and vol. 3, p. 613n) also argues this point.

  9 Delhi

  Many genuine descendants of the Prophet arrived there from Arabia, many traders from Khurasan, many painters from China . . . many learned men from every part. In that auspicious city they gathered, they came like moths around a candle.1

  Isami

  Arriving at the western edge of the Indo–Gangetic plain, Ibn Battuta was entering a world region where his co-believers made up only a small minority of the population. They were, however, the minority that ruled the greater part of the subcontinent of India. Over the very long term the fundamental patterns of Indian society and culture had been defined by the repeated invasions of barbarian charioteers or cavalrymen from Afghanistan or the steppe lands beyond. In the eleventh century, about the same time that the Seljuks were radically changing the political map of the Middle East, the Muslim Turkish rulers of Afghanistan began dispatching great bands of holy warriors against the Hindu cultivators of the Indus and Ganges valleys. These ghazis seized the main towns of the Punjab, or upper Indus region. Lahore became a capital of two Turko–Afghan dynasties, first the Ghaznavids and later the Ghurids.

  In 1193 Qutb al-Din Aybek, a Ghurid slave commander, captured Delhi, then a small Hindu capital strategically located on the Yamuna River at the eastern end of the natural military route through the Punjab plain to the fertile Ganges basin. In 1206 he seized power in his own right, proclaiming Delhi the capital of a new Muslim military state. During the ensuing century the sultans of the Slave Dynasty, as it was called after the mamluk origins of its rulers, defeated one after another the Hindu kingdoms into which North India was fragmented and founded an empire extending from the Indus to the Bay of Bengal.

  The first phase of the Muslim conquest of North India was a splendid ghazi adventure of looting, shooting, and smashing up the gods of Hindu idolators. The new kings of Dehli, however, imposed civil order on the conquered areas and created a structure of despotism designed to tax rather than slaughter the native peasantry. In the rich plains around the capital, the Muslim military elite secured its authority as a kind of ruling caste atop the stratified social system of the Hindus. A pyramid of administration was erected linking the sultan, from whom all power derived by right of conquest, with several levels of officialdom down to the petty Hindu functionaries who supervised tax collections in thousands of farming villages. Like the Turkish rulers of the Middle East and Anatolia, the sultans learned proper Muslim statecraft from the Abbasid tradition, though adding here and there colorful bits of Hindu ceremonial. Within several decades of the founding of the sultanate, these erstwhile tribal chieftains were transforming themselves into Indo–Persian monarchs, secluded from the populace at the center of a maze of intimidating ritual and an ever-growing army of officials, courtiers, and bodyguards.

  Map 9: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in India, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, 1333–45

  Delhi grew rapidly in the thirteenth century, not because it was an important center of industry or a key intersection of trade, but because it was the imperial residence. As Ibn Battuta had witnessed in other leading capitals, the operation of the army, the bureaucracy, and the royal household required an immense supporting staff of clerks, servants, soldiers, construction workers, merchants, artisans, transporters, shopkeepers, tailors, and barbers. Delhi was typical of parasitic medieval capitals, its royal establishment feeding magnificently off the labor of the lower orders and the revenues of hundreds of thousands of Hindu farmers.

  In 1290 the Slave dynasty expired and was succeeded by two lines of Turkish sultans. The first were the Khaljis (1290–1320), men sprung from an Afghan tribe of that name. The second were the Tughluqids (1320–1414), called after the founding ruler, Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. During the first four decades of these kings, the empire expanded spectacularly. ’Ala al-Din Khalji (1296–1316), a brilliant administrator, created a new standing army of cavalry, war-elephants, and Hindu infantry. Advancing to the Deccan plateau of Central India, he conquered one important Hindu state and raided nearly to the tip of the subcontinent. Areas of South India that ’Ala al-Din merely plundered, Ghiyath al-Din Tughluq (1320–25) and his son Muhammad Tughluq (1325–51) invaded again, then a
nnexed to the empire, replacing Hindu tributaries with Turkish or Afghan governors appointed from Delhi. By 1333 Muhammad Tughluq ruled over most of India. Thus the congeries of ethnic groups, languages, and castes that comprised the civilization of the subcontinent were politically united, however precariously, for the first time since the Gupta empire of the fifth century A.D.

  The great danger of dispatching armies as much as 1,300 miles south of Delhi was that the northwest frontier might be inadequately defended against new disturbances emanating from Inner Asia. In 1221–22, just 18 years after the founding of the sultanate, Chinggis Khan advanced across the Hindu Kush and penetrated as far east as the Indus. In the reign of the Great Khan Ogedei, the Tatars invaded again, seizing Lahore in 1241. Later in the century the Khans of Chagatay, hemmed into the steppe by the other three Mongol kingdoms, looked upon India as the most promising outlet for their combative energies. Chagatay armies and raiding parties crossed the Sulayman mountain passes in the 1290s and continued to do so repeatedly for three more decades. About 1329 Tarmashirin, the Chagatay khan whom Ibn Battuta visited a few years later, invaded India and even threatened Delhi. But Muhammad Tughluq chased him back across the Indus, putting an end to further Mongol incursions of any moment (at least until the catastrophic invasion of Tamerlane at the end of the century).