In 1325, a twenty-one-year-old law student from Tangier left home to make the hajj to Mecca. He did not come back for twenty-nine years. By the time he returned, he had traveled approximately seventy-five thousand miles across Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, India, China, Southeast Asia, and the Sahara. Marco Polo, by comparison, covered about fifteen thousand miles. Ibn Battuta traveled five times farther and is a fraction as famous in the West. He started as a pilgrim. He ended as the most widely traveled person in the premodern world.

He Kept Getting Jobs in Places He Had Never Been

Ibn Battuta had a remarkable talent for arriving in foreign courts and being immediately appointed to positions of authority. In Delhi, the Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughluq made him a judge. In the Maldives, he became a qadi, an Islamic magistrate. In Mali, he was received as a distinguished guest by the emperor. Historians of medieval Islamic travel at SOAS University of London have studied Ibn Battuta's social mobility as a product of the dar al-Islam, the interconnected Muslim world that stretched from Morocco to Indonesia. A Muslim jurist from Morocco could find employment in India because the legal tradition was shared. The language of scholarship was Arabic. The networks of hospitality were established by centuries of pilgrimage and trade. This is the part of medieval history that European-centered textbooks consistently understate. While Europe was fragmented into feudal territories with limited communication between them, the Islamic world operated as a coherent civilization across which scholars, merchants, and pilgrims moved with relative freedom. Ibn Battuta's journey was extraordinary in its scope but not in its possibility. The roads existed. The infrastructure existed. He just walked farther down them than anyone else.

The Book Was Dictated From Memory and Some of It Is Probably Made Up

When Ibn Battuta finally returned to Morocco, the Sultan ordered a court scholar named Ibn Juzayy to record his travels. The resulting book, the Rihla, was dictated entirely from memory. Ibn Battuta had kept no journal. He had taken no notes. He told his story, and Ibn Juzayy wrote it down, polishing the prose and adding literary flourishes. Scholars of Arabic literature at the University of Cairo have debated for decades which parts of the Rihla are accurate and which are embellished or fabricated. His account of China, in particular, contains descriptions that do not match any known Chinese city and may have been borrowed from other travelers' accounts. His claim to have visited Constantinople has been questioned. Some incidents appear in multiple cities, suggesting either faulty memory or deliberate repetition. None of this diminishes the achievement. Even if the most skeptical scholars are correct and Ibn Battuta exaggerated his China visit, the documented portions of his journey still cover more territory than any other individual in the fourteenth century. He crossed the Sahara. He sailed the Indian Ocean. He survived the Black Death, which he encountered in Syria in 1348. He traveled for twenty-nine years because the world was large and he wanted to see it. He came home and told stories, and the stories were big enough to contain both truth and invention, which is the only kind of travel story worth telling.