Ibn Battuta and the Silk Road

Abu Abdallah ibn Battuta, born in Tangier in 1304 CE, is the most widely travelled geographical writer of the medieval Islamic world. Over roughly three decades, beginning with a hajj pilgrimage in 1325, he covered an estimated 120,000 kilometres through Dar al-Islam and beyond — from the Maghreb to Egypt, the Levant, Arabia, East Africa, the steppe, the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara, the Indus valley, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and the Malabar coast. The account he dictated on his return, the Rihla, is one of the principal documentary sources for the cultural and commercial life of the fourteenth century. I should say at the start that the Rihla is, technically, not an autobiography at all; it was dictated to Ibn Juzayy in 1355, more than a decade after the journeys it describes.

The Moroccan beginnings

Ibn Battuta came from a family of jurists in the Marinid sultanate of Morocco, and he left his home in June 1325, aged twenty-one, with the declared intention of performing the hajj. Unlike his near-contemporary Marco Polo, he was not the agent of a state or trading company; he was a private traveller, and his journey was repeatedly extended and reshaped by curiosity, by employment opportunities, and by the accidents of war and weather. The Rihla is not autobiography in the modern sense but a jurist’s notebook, organised by itinerary rather than personal reflection. The opening pages make this clear: the first proper entry is not about Tangier at all but about the road south to Sijilmasa, and the author’s home is barely described.

Ibn Battuta is, of the medieval travelers, the one who covered the most ground.

Egypt, Syria, and the Hejaz

Cairo. November 1326. Twenty-two years old, and not yet half a year into a journey that will last thirty.

Ibn Battuta reached Cairo in 1326 and spent the better part of two years in the Mamluk Sultanate. He climbed the Great Pyramid of Giza, travelled up the Nile to Upper Egypt, and then crossed Sinai into the Levant, visiting Jerusalem, Damascus, and Aleppo. The detailed description of Aleppo and the Mamluk grain trade is among the most valuable sections of the Rihla, because the routes along which he travelled were also the western termini of the caravan trade from Iran and Central Asia. His account of the markets and religious endowments of Mamluk Syria shows how the overland network was integrated, at its western end, with the maritime trade of the Mediterranean. The Gibb translation (Hakluyt Society, four volumes, 1958–1994, with a fifth index volume added later) is still the English text to use; volume 2 is the one that covers the Mamluk stretch.

A personal note

Ibn Battuta’s account of China is the most suspect part of his Rihla. He reached Quanzhou and possibly Beijing, but the Chinese sections of the book contain some descriptions that look borrowed from earlier Arabic geographers rather than from direct observation. The skeptical view (that the Chinese section is partly a literary construction) is taken more seriously in modern scholarship than it used to be.

Further reading

If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.

• Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
• Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
• Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
• The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
• One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

Related pages

See also Famous travelers of the Silk Road, The spread of Islam along the Silk Road, and The Islamic Golden Age and the Silk Road.