Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
From Alexandria, Ibn Battuta traveled to Cairo and Damascus before
making the 1,500-km journey to the holy cities of Medina and Mecca. At
this point he could have returned to his home city of Fes, but instead
turned east and traveled through the land that is now Iraq and southern
Persia before crossing the Persian Gulf to Yemen, on the Arabian Penin-
sula. During these early years of his travels, he spent most of his time on
the move—seemingly from a sense of adventure. He kept going southward,
down the East African coast as far as Kilwa in modern Tanzania, then a
Muslim sultanate growing prosperous on gold and slaves. From Kilwa he
returned to Mecca (this time staying for a year) before passing through
Syria to Anatolia, birthplace of the Ottoman Empire, during the period of
the initial Ottoman expansion.
Ibn Battuta crossed the Black Sea from the Anatolian port of Sinope to
the Crimea, then part of the Golden Horde. This massive empire stretched
across the southern Russian steppe and was a branch of the larger Mongol
domains that had converted to Islam. He journeyed with the khan as far as
Astrakhan, on the Volga, before making a side trip to the then-Christian
city of Constantinople (modern Istanbul). He returned to Astrakhan and
from there headed further east, past the Caspian Sea to Bukhara and
Samarkand, before turning south through the Hindu Kush and settling in
Delhi, India, where he stayed for several years. At this time Delhi was a
Muslim sultanate (the Tughluq dynasty), and Ibn Battuta used his knowl-
edge of Islamic law to talk himself into a job with the sultan. He stayed in
India for the next 12 years, though he made many side trips—to Ceylon,
Sumatra, Vietnam, and to Yuan China—as the Tughluq sultan's ambas-
sador. Finally, after nearly a quarter-century away, in 1349 he returned
home via Hormuz and Damascus.
But Ibn Battuta was not yet done traveling. Three years after his return
to Morocco, he was o√ on another journey. This time he headed south
through the Sahara to the nation of Mali and its eastern neighbor, the
Songay kingdom. His detailed descriptions of these states are the best
source of information about them during this period for modern historians
of sub-Saharan Africa. He was back home after two years, and this time he
stayed there. He dictated from memory the story of his 25-year journey in a
book, Rihla , most of which is accepted as true. This account did not become
well-known to scholars—even in the Muslim world—until in the nine-
teenth century. Ibn Battuta was well aware of the scope of his travels. In
Rihla , he comments that he met someone named Abdullah al-Misri, ''the
traveler, and a man of saintly life. He journeyed through the earth, but he
 
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