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Ibn Battuta
The Tangier jurist who covered some 120,000 kilometres a century and a half before Columbus.
The rise
Born in Tangier in 1304 into a family of Islamic judges, Ibn Battuta left home at 21 to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, alone and on a donkey. The journey lasted nearly thirty years: he resolved never to travel the same road twice, and turned a hajj into a tour of the entire Islamic world and beyond.
What they did
He crossed North Africa, Arabia, Persia, the Swahili coast, Anatolia, the Golden Horde, India, where he served the sultan of Delhi as a judge for years, the Maldives, Ceylon, Southeast Asia and China, then al-Andalus and the Mali empire in 1352–53. Dictated to Ibn Juzayy in 1355, his Rihla is the richest first-hand account of the fourteenth-century world.
The full picture
Scholars doubt he reached China or the Volga Bulgars; parts of the Rihla borrow from earlier travellers, and Ibn Juzayy polished the prose. He owned and traded slaves, married and divorced repeatedly along the way, and judged the Malians harshly for their customs. Yet his eye for detail on Kilwa, Mogadishu and Mali remains irreplaceable evidence of medieval African cities.
Why it matters
Ibn Battuta is the Moroccan who proved that Africa produced the medieval world's greatest traveller, and his pages on Mali and the Swahili coast are among the only written windows into those societies at their height. He embodies an interconnected Afro-Asian world that predates Europe's age of exploration.
“Swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a long-cherished desire to visit those glorious sanctuaries, I resolved to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home.”