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

by Ross E. Dunn

  At the same time that Ibn Battuta had been sailing westward from China to his expectant reunion with the Islamic heartland, so the Black Death, the greatest pandemic disaster since the sixth century, was making its terrible way across the Central Asian grasslands to the shores of the Black Sea. Plague was endemic among ground-burrowing rodent populations of the Inner Asian steppe. It was transmitted from animals to humans by the bite of a common species of flea. Hatching and living in the fur of plague-afflicted rats, infected fleas found their way to sacks of grain and other foodstuffs or to clothing. The plague appears to have started among pastoral folk of East Central Asia, spreading outward from there along the trade routes both southwest and west, beginning about 1331. Lurking among the merchandise in commercial wagon trains or the storerooms of caravansaries, fleas carried the bacillus Yersinia pestis to the bloodstream of humans. The bubonic type of plague, which produced buboes on the body, could be spread only by infected fleas and their rodent hosts. However, pneumonic plague, the deadlier form of the disease, was transmitted directly from one human to another. As the pestilence broke out in one oasis or khan after another, survivors hurried onto the next place along the trail, thereby unwittingly carrying the disease throughout the commercial network of the steppe. The same Mongol law and order that made possible a century of intense human interchange between China and the Atlantic coast now quickened the progress of the plague bacillus across Eurasia. The Black Death was the grimly ironic price the world paid for the trans-hemispheric unity of the Pax Mongolica.

  In China, where frontier fortifications were no defense whatsoever against the advance of the invader, major outbreaks of plague occurred in 1353 and 1354, producing massive mortality and economic disruption and probably contributing to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty 14 years later. In the west the disease advanced through the Kipchak Khanate to the Black Sea, where it struck the Genoese colony at Kaffa in 1346. From there Italian ships carried infected rats and fleas amongst cargoes of grain, timber, and furs southward to Constantinople, then on to Venice and Genoa. The epidemic appeared about simultaneously in Sicily and Egypt in the autumn of 1347. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi tells the ghastly tale of a trading ship, probably from the Black Sea, arriving one day in Alexandria harbor. Out of a total company of 332, all but 40 sailors, 4 merchants, and 1 slave had succumbed to the plague at sea. And all who had survived the voyage presently died in the port.6

  In the calamitous year of 1348 ships of death coursed westward throughout the Mediterranean basin, inflicting their grim lading on one port after another. From the ports, mule trains and camel caravans transmitted the disease to the interior regions of Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. Paris and Bordeaux, Barcelona and Valencia, Tunis and Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo all suffered massive plague mortality in the spring and summer of 1348. By the following year the contagion was moving up the valley of the Nile and crossing the English Channel to the British Isles. By the end of 1350, when the first assault of the disease was playing itself out, Europe may have lost as much as one-third of its population. Mortality rates in the Islamic lands were probably comparable. Cairo’s pre-plague population of perhaps half a million may have been reduced by 200,000. The population of Damascus may have diminished from 80,000 to less than 50,000.7

  The Black Death struck the cities and towns of Islam with the suddenness and surprise of a Mongol attack. The usual patterns of quotidian life were abandoned, and communities gave themselves to prayers of supplication and to the overwhelming task of washing, shrouding, and burying the proliferating dead. Funeral processions moved through the streets in a never-ending parade of grief. Stocks of burial garments ran out, and gravediggers who managed to survive commanded exorbitant fees for their work. Mosques closed when all the officials and caretakers died. Many who fled the plague in vain hope of evading it fell dead along the road with their horses and camels. A scholar witnessing the scene in Egypt writes of “these dead who are laid out on the highway like an ambush for others.”8

  Both Muslims and Christians struggled to fit this unprecedented disaster into a framework of spiritual meaning. Christian doctrine invited the conclusion that the sins of mankind had accumulated to the point where God was obliged to teach his creation a lesson it would never forget. Amid the horrors of the plague, many believed this lesson was to be the final one, the end of the world. A mood of impending apocalypse seized Europe, producing obsessive preoccupation with images of death, furious self-flagellating movements to expiate sins, and massacres of Jews, the traditional target of hostility and fear. In Islam, by contrast, no doctrine of original sin pervaded theology. All events affecting the community of believers were to be understood as the continuing revealing of God’s will. Despite social trauma in the midst of the plague, Muslims mostly accepted it as a manifestation of God’s unknowable plan for His creation. Mass public supplications to God to lift the scourge probably occurred in most cities and towns of the Middle East, but expiation crusades, messianism, or persecution of minorities were not in evidence.

  Neither Muslims nor Christians in that age had the faintest notion of the medical pathology of the disease, which was not discovered until the late nineteenth century. In both Europe and the Islamic world the epidemic was generally attributed to a miasma, that is, a corruption of the air. Some authorities linked it to a polluted wind, a mysterious “impoisoned blast” blowing out of Central Asia or from the open sea.9 Prophylactic advice abounded. Muslims were recommended to live in fresh air, sprinkle one’s house with rose water and vinegar, sit as motionless as possible, and eat plenty of pickled onions and fresh fruit. Those who fell victim to the disease were advised to have their blood drawn, apply egg yolk to the plague buboes, wear magical amulets, or have their sick bed strewn with fresh flowers. Above all, God’s creatures were urged to spend their nights in the mosque and beg divine mercy.

  Ibn Battuta says nothing of any personal measures he may have taken to keep from falling ill, but he left Damascus sometime after July 1348 in good health, even as the pestilence raged around him. He does not seem to have taken to the road to escape the plague but only to continue on his way to Mecca by way of Egypt, where the sickness was as bad as it was in Syria, if not worse. Traveling southward into Palestine through one depopulated village after another, their water wheels idle and their fields abandoned, he arrived at Jerusalem to find that the contagion had abated there. In fact, the preacher of the grand mosque invited him to a feast in fulfillment of an oath to give special thanks to God as soon as a day passed on which no one perished.

  Joining up with two gentlemen of North African origin, Ibn Battuta continued on in their company through Judaea to Gaza, which he found mostly deserted in the wake of the Death. Indeed the population of the entire Nile Delta region was declining drastically in the fall months of 1348, when the plague was at its worst.10 The travelers passed through Alexandria, where the epidemic may have first entered Egypt in the fall of 1347, to learn that there the daily mortality rate was finally subsiding.

  In Cairo, however, the toll was still rising. Urban land and property were being abandoned precipitately, commerce and industry became paralyzed, and, in the words of one chronicler, “the deaths had increased until it had emptied the streets.”11 The Mamluk Sultan al-Hasan fled from Cairo to a country estate in September and stayed away from his capital for three months.12 The royal officer corps, living in close quarters in the Citadel and refusing to leave Cairo for fear of losing their power and rank to rival Mamluks, sustained such a high rate of die-off that the army and administration of the sultanate fell into a state of disorder and diminished capacity lasting several decades.13

  Ibn Battuta probably stayed in the ravaged city no more than a few days, then continued on up the Nile. Now, happily, he moved ahead of the plague, which did not strike Upper Egypt until about February 1349.14 Crossing the Red Sea from ’Aydhab to Jidda as he had done in the reverse direction 18 years earlier, he performed the ceremony of the tawa
f around the Holy Ka’ba on 16 November 1348 (22 Sha’ban 749), praising God that he had so far been spared. He remained in Mecca for more than four months as the guest of the Maliki imam, awaiting the hajj of 749. He relates nothing about plague in the city, though other historical sources report that it raged there during the pilgrimage season, introduced by the caravans from Egypt or Syria.15

  Since returning from India, Ibn Battuta’s wish had been to stand before the Holy House one more time. Now that he had done it, he may have had no further plans in particular. For the time being at least, he decided to go back to Cairo (by a route through Medina, Jerusalem, and the Sinai). The Mamluk capital was hardly the city he had known in 1326. Aside from the ruin and wastage of the plague (which abated only after January 1349), the quality of leadership over the Mamluk state had badly deteriorated since the death of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala’un in 1341. Over the ensuing decade that great builder was succeeded by four different sons and grandsons, all of whom were lusterless or infantile pawns of one quarreling military faction or another.

  Perhaps the bleak scene in Cairo quickened the journeyer’s resolve to return at last to his native land. He was 45 years old, he had been abroad for 24 years, and, so far as he knew, his aged mother was alive and still living in Tangier. In his absence Fez, the capital of the Marinid dynasty, had blossomed into the premier city of Maliki religious and legal studies in western Islam. As a former qadi of the Sultanate of Delhi, he should, if he wished, have no trouble securing a government post either in Fez or some other Moroccan town. And, ironically enough, Morocco was one of the few corners of the Islamic world he had not yet explored. In the end, however, sentiment and nothing else may have impelled him to head for that beautiful land of the Far West: “I was moved [to go back] by memories of my homeland, affection for my family and dear friends, who drew me toward my land, which, in my opinion, was better than any other country.”16

  Leaving Egypt for the last time on a small vessel belonging to a mariner from Tunis, Ibn Battuta sailed along the Cyrenaican and Tripolitanian coasts to the port of Gabès (Kabis) on the south Ifriqiyan mainland where he passed the feast of the Prophet’s birthday on 31 May 1349 (12 Rabi’ I 750) in the company of the local notables. Continuing up the coast by sea, he joined a party of bedouin traveling overland to Tunis, a city then under the command of the Amir of the Muslims and Defender of the Faith Abu l’Hasan, Sultan of Morocco.

  A quarter of a century earlier Ibn Battuta had traveled across the Eastern Maghrib in conditions of military turmoil. Now it might have appeared to him that little had changed. The Arab tribes of the Ifriqiyan plains were up in arms, and Tunis lay under siege. Yet the pattern of North African power politics had altered drastically in his absence. By going abroad for so long he had missed most of the reign of Abu l’Hasan (1331–51), the most illustrious of the Marinid kings. Called the Black Sultan because of the dark visage he inherited from his Ethiopian slave mother, Abu l’Hasan was more than any of his predecessors impassioned by the old Almohad vision of a vast Islamic state embracing the entire western Mediterranean basin. In 1333 he recaptured Gibraltar from King Alfonso XI of Castile and during the ensuing four years seized most of the important towns of the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom of the central Maghrib, including Tlemcen, the capital. In 1340 he sent 44 war galleys into the Strait of Gibraltar to inflict a calamitous defeat on the Castilian fleet. Six months later he launched an invasion of Spain in alliance with the Sultanate of Granada. This time, however, a combined army of heavily armored knights from Castile, Aragon, and Portugal routed his forces near the Rio Salado.

  The Battle of Rio Salado ended once and for all any serious Muslim hopes of reversing the Christian reconquista. Indeed, Abu l’Hasan may have been so fearful that the Spanish crusade would now advance on Africa that he redoubled his efforts to bring the entire Maghrib and its resources in commerce and manpower under his control. Taking advantage of a succession crisis within the ruling Hafsid family, he invaded Ifriqiya by land and sea in September 1347 and drove the Hasfids from Tunis.

  The Marinid seizure of Tunis was a remarkable feat of military leadership. Yet Abu l’Hasan’s army was now operating almost 900 miles from Fez, and the Ifriqiyan population remained implacably hostile to his occupation. In the spring of 1348 he ventured to firm up his authority over the plains south of the capital, but an alliance of bedouin tribes met his forces near Kairouan and beat them so badly that he was forced to retreat to Tunis by sea in utter humiliation. As if his human detractors were not troublesome enough, his Ifriqiyan campaign coincided with the arrival of the Black Death. According to the historian Ibn Khaldun, the plague so debilitated his army in the field that it “settled the affair” at the Battle of Kairouan.17 When he fell back on Tunis, he found the contagion ravaging the city and killing off his courtiers and officials. Abu ’Inan, the sultan’s son and governor of the central Maghrib, heard reports that his father had died at Kairouan. Fearing rebellion in Morocco, he had himself proclaimed sultan at Tlemcen in June 1348 and quickly marched on Fez.

  When Ibn Battuta arrived in Tunis just one year later, the Marinid dream of Mediterranean empire was for the time being dead. Abu l’Hasan was still there, but bottled up within the Hafsid palace and doing nothing to repel the bedouin forces which commanded the countryside beyond the city walls. A large number of Moroccan scholars had accompanied the sultan to Ifriqiya, and Ibn Battuta found lodging with one of them, apparently a cousin of his. He had at least two audiences with his hapless sovereign, giving him the usual information about the countries he had visited.

  Ibn Battuta stayed in Tunis for about a month, then decided to continue on to Morocco despite the agitated state of political affairs all across the Maghrib. He left Ifriqiya on a Catalan vessel, hardly a surprising choice since in the mid fourteenth century the merchants and ship masters of Barcelona dominated trade on the sea routes between Spain and the Sicilian Channel. The ship was bound for Tenès on the Algerian coast but on the way put in at Cagliari at the southern end of the island of Sardinia.18

  The Kingdom of Aragon–Catalonia ruled the coastal regions of Sardinia, giving Ibn Battuta an opportunity to set foot on Latin Christian soil, the only time he would do so in his traveling career. The visit, however, was brief and disagreeable. He left the ship to visit a marketplace inside a chateau-fort in the vicinity of the port. But then he was informed that some piratical residents of the island had in mind to pursue his vessel after it embarked in order to seize the Muslim passengers and presumably hold them for ransom. Swearing that he would fast for two consecutive months if the Almighty saved him from these sea rovers, he reboarded his ship, which, as it happened, continued on its way without incident. After ten days at sea, he reached Tenès.

  Map 12: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in North Africa, Spain, and West Africa, 1349–54

  From here he traveled overland to Tlemcen, which was then under the authority of the rebellious Abu ’Inan. Here he joined two men of Tangierian origin and continued westward in their company. In the wild hills near the modern day Algero–Moroccan border the little party had a close brush with a band of highwaymen, but they passed on safely to Taza, the little hillside city commanding the high road to Fez. Apparently meeting up with more travelers from Tangier, Ibn Battuta learned that the Black Death had carried off his elderly mother only several months earlier. Had she heard in her last days, perhaps from pilgrims returning from the hajj of 749, that her long-departed son had been seen in Mecca and might finally be coming home?

  When Ibn Battuta left Morocco in 1325, he may well have intended at the time to return in two or three years to pursue advanced legal studies in Fez. Under the patronage of the Marinid sultans, the city had come to rival Tunis as the premier North African center of Maliki jurisprudence and Arab letters. The war captains of the Banu Marin had rudely seized power in Morocco in 1248 without possessing any religious ideology to justify their authority. Consequently, they moved quickly to assert their distinctive legitimacy by
distancing themselves from the idiosyncratic theological doctrines of the Almohads. They moved the dynastic capital from Marrakech to Fez and invited learned exponents of Malikism, whose views had been suppressed during the Almohad century, to take up residence in the city, revitalize orthodox Maliki education, and serve the administrative and judicial needs of the new government.

  When the Banu Marin came to power, Fez was already an important Almohad military center and a busy commercial junction linking the trans-Maghrib road with the caravan routes that brought West African gold and ivory to the ports of the Mediterranean. Nestled saucer-like in a lovely valley between the southern spurs of the Rif and the central plain, Fez had an abundant water supply and a rich agricultural hinterland which animated a profusion of craft industries.

  Physically, ancient Fez occupied a remarkably small territory, its growing population of merchants, artisans, civil officials, scholars, laborers, and transients crammed within the circular walls that enclosed the valley. Then in 1276 Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, the second Marinid sultan, built a new urban foundation, called Fez Jdid, or New Fez, to serve as the military and administrative center of the dynasty. Set on a plateau above the old city and enclosed within high double walls, Fez Jdid, like the Mamluk citadel of Cairo, rose up as a conspicuous, fear-inspiring symbol of Marinid power and permanence. It was the exclusive sanctuary of the sultan, his high officials, his accountants and secretaries, and selected units of the royal army.