Ibn Battuta's travels

journey · 1325 AD–1354 AD

The Moroccan scholar Ibn Battuta left Tangier in 1325 on pilgrimage to Mecca and did not come home for twenty-four years, travelling through the Middle East, East Africa, Central Asia, India, the Maldives and, by his account, China. A final journey took him across the Sahara to the Mali Empire. His Rihla was written down by Ibn Juzayy in 1355. Its chronology has known inconsistencies, so dates here follow Ross Dunn's reconstruction, and his claims to have reached northern China are doubted by many scholars. Only a selection of his many side journeys is mapped.

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Recorded boundaries

Period	Control	Confidence	Evidence	Notes
1325 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Set out from Tangier. Reached Tunis. Set out alone, aged twenty-one, on pilgrimage to Mecca.
1326 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Alexandria → Cairo → Damascus → Medina → Mecca. Completed his first hajj.
1327 AD–1329 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Baghdad → Tabriz → Mecca. Stayed on in Mecca to study, probably until 1330.
1330 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Aden → Mogadishu → Mombasa → Kilwa. The southernmost point of his travels, a rich Swahili trading city.
1331 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Hormuz.
1332 AD	—	low confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Mecca → Konya → Kaffa → Sarai → Constantinople. Travelled with a Byzantine princess married to Özbeg, khan of the Golden Horde.
1333 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Bukhara → Samarkand → Indus.
1334 AD–1341 AD	—	high confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Delhi. Served Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq as a qadi for about eight years.
1342 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Calicut. Sent as the sultan's envoy to China, he lost the ships carrying his gifts and companions in a storm here.
1343 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Maldives. Served as a qadi and married into the islands' ruling family.
1344 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Ceylon. Climbed Adam's Peak.
1345 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Bengal → Samudra.
1346 AD	—	low confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Quanzhou. His account of travelling further north to Hangzhou and Beijing is widely doubted, and is not mapped.
1347 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Calicut → Hormuz.
1348 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Baghdad → Damascus → Mecca. Arrived as the Black Death reached Syria.
1349 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Cairo → Tunis → Fez. Home after twenty-four years; his mother had died of the plague months before.
1350 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Granada.
1351 AD	—	medium confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Fez.
1352 AD	—	low confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Taghaza → Walata → Niani. Salt-mining town in the Sahara built, he wrote, of salt blocks. Capital of the Mali Empire. Its location is uncertain, and this is one proposed site.
1353 AD	—	low confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Timbuktu → Takedda.
1354 AD	—	high confidence	no observation date recorded	Reached Fez. Dictated the Rihla to Ibn Juzayy at the command of the Marinid sultan.

Each row is a snapshot the source recorded, not a continuous history. The period between two observations is an inference this atlas shows rather than hides.

Sources

Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, (1986)
Ibn Battuta; translated by H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325–1354, (1958)

Elsewhere

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibn_Battuta