Chapter 1Tangier

Foreword

He traveled for twenty-nine years and wrote nothing down.

That sentence is the reason this book exists and it is the fact that seven centuries of readers have found it easiest to forget.

There is no Ibn Battuta diary. No notebook, no letters home, no log kept at sea, no marginalia in a borrowed manuscript. He left Tangier alone on 14 June 1325 at twenty-one and came back in 1349, and went out again to Mali in 1351, and returned in 1354 — and in all of that there is not one page written at the time by the man who was there.

What survives is a court commission.

In Fez, in 1354 and 1355, a Marinid sultan named Abu Inan Faris wanted a gift for his court, and assigned a professional Andalusian stylist to take a fifty-year-old traveler's dictation. The stylist supplied the poetry, the rhetorical framing and the ornament. Where the memory ran dry he quietly imported pages from Ibn Jubayr, who had described Damascus in the 1180s, a hundred and forty years earlier, and he did not say so. The work was finished in December 1355 and its title translates as something like A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.

That is the description of a commission, not of a chronicle.

So the argument of this book is that the journey and the book are two different objects, and that the confusion of them is the oldest error in the subject.

I want to be precise about what that does not claim. It is not a claim that Ibn Battuta was a fraud. It is a claim that he was a rememberer under commission, working from a memory thirty years deep, alongside a professional whose job was to make the result readable — and that the consequences of that arrangement are not evenly distributed across the text.

Some sections are almost certainly invented. The excursion north to Bolghar for the short summer nights has been doubted since 1929 and this book treats it as very probably fabricated. The claimed journey to the Yuan court at Khanbaliq will not fit any chronology that can be constructed, contains material lifted from earlier Arabic writers, and puts an emperor in the wrong place; the southern Chinese ports are another matter and Chapter 14 separates them.

And some sections are the best eyewitness testimony we possess about anything.

There is no other account by a visitor of imperial Mali under Mansa Sulayman. None. The Anatolian chapters, on the akhi brotherhoods and the fragmenting Turkish beyliks, are rated by historians as the most valuable material in the book. The seven years at the court of Muhammad ibn Tughluq at Delhi are the best-corroborated stretch in the whole work and the closest he ever stood to power. And the description of Damascus in the plague summer of 1348 — a city fasting three days and walking out barefoot in procession, Muslims and Christians and Jews together — is a first-hand account of the Black Death by a man who was in the street.

This book refuses to choose between those two facts about its source, and it grades the evidence chapter by chapter, in the text, rather than issuing a verdict at the end.

There is a structural consequence of the argument that the reader should be told about now. The last three chapters are not about a journey.

Chapter 19 is the room in Fez where the book was made: the sultan, the scribe, the dictation, the borrowings, the meaning of the word wrote. Chapter 20 is the reception, and the machinery collapsing — the scribe dead within about a year of finishing, and Abu Inan strangled by his own vizier on 10 January 1358, so that the book was orphaned before anyone had decided whether it was true. Chapter 21 is the five centuries the manuscripts slept in North Africa, their arrival in Paris as salvage from the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s, and the modern industry of Ibn Battuta shopping malls and airport terminals and a crater on the Moon.

He has no grave. Marrakesh, Fez and Tangier are all claimed, the tomb shown to visitors is unproven, and the man who saw everything cannot be located.

One more thing, and it is the chapter this genre does not usually write.

Ibn Battuta bought, sold, married and abandoned enslaved people across three continents for thirty years. When his ship was seized off Sumatra in 1342 he lost his goods, his gifts, and the people he had enslaved, in that order, which is the order he lists them in. In September 1353 he left Takedda for home with a caravan that included six hundred enslaved women being walked north across the Sahara to the Maghrib markets, and he recorded the number without comment because he expected none.

That is Chapter 18, and it is placed at the end of the traveling rather than in a note, so that it cannot be stepped around.

Two conventions, declared here.

Arabic and Persian names are given in a simplified form without diacritics throughout, with the full form once at first mention.

And direct quotation is confined to translations in the public domain, named in the text where they appear. Where the standard modern translations are the only rendering available, this book paraphrases and says that it is paraphrasing. Nothing here appears inside quotation marks that is not somebody's published words.

The itinerary in these pages is a reconstruction. The dates in the Rihla do not cohere — Anatolia, the Golden Horde and East Africa cannot all be where the text puts them — and every published route, including this one, is a modern scholar's repair of a fourteenth-century memory.

Chapter 8 shows the reader exactly where it breaks, in the chapter they are being asked to trust.

Chapter 1 · Tangier

Tangier stands on a bay at the corner where the Atlantic becomes the Mediterranean, and what a person on its shore looks at is not Africa. Across nine miles of water lies Spain. The far coast is not a rumor there; it is weather, a line of hills that some mornings is a smudge and other mornings is close enough to count the folds in. Everything moving between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic passes the town, and everything crossing between Africa and Europe crosses in front of it. A boy raised on that shore grew up with the ordinary daily knowledge that the world had an edge nearby and that the edge was crossable, and with the less ordinary knowledge that the crossing led to a country under other law.

Into a family of judges in that port, on 24 February 1304, was born Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Abdallah ibn Muhammad ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati al-Tanji. History kept the shortest available handle and threw away the rest of it. He is Ibn Battuta.

The date is exact, and it is worth pausing on where it comes from, because the answer governs everything that follows in this book. It comes from him. It sits inside a work he did not write and never held a pen over: Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara'ib al-amsar wa-'aja'ib al-asfar — A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling — dictated at Fez in 1354-55, at the command of a sultan who wanted a book for his court, taken down and shaped by a professional Andalusian stylist, and finished in December 1355. The man giving the dictation was fifty. He was recalling his own birth as a man recalls anything he has been told rather than seen, and he was recalling it in a room where the object being made was a gift. No baptismal register, no notarized deed, no chancery entry corroborates the day. It is not doubted, and it should not be; a Maghribi family of jurists kept track of such things, and there is no motive anywhere in the text for inventing a birthday. But the first fact in this biography reaches us the way every other fact about the man reaches us, which is through the memory of a fifty-year-old and the pen of somebody else. That is not a caveat to be discharged in a footnote. It is the subject.

It is worth setting the terms out at the start, because they do not improve later. He kept no journal on the road that anyone has ever seen, and whether he kept notes of any kind is not established. An unknown number of the stories in his book were the common property of the merchant routes before he told them, and there is no method for separating what he saw from what he was told in a caravanserai by a man who had also only been told it. Most of the women he married are unnamed. Every one of the people he bought, was given, traveled with, and lost is unnamed. Sections of the book were taken from earlier writers without acknowledgment, and at least one long stretch of the journey is judged by the scholarship to have been invented outright. The dates it gives do not cohere: some sequences cannot be fitted into the years assigned to them, and every itinerary of this life ever printed, the one in this book included, is a modern reconstruction. None of this is a scandal uncovered by modern research; almost all of it is visible on the face of the text to anyone reading it with attention. It does mean that a biography of this man is, unavoidably and at every point, a biography of a document.

Of the twenty-one years he spent in Tangier before he left it, the record preserves almost nothing. No teacher is named. No mosque or school is named. No document survives that was written in the town about the family, and no contemporary who knew the boy left an account of him. We do not know what he looked like, whether he had brothers or sisters, whether the household was comfortable or straitened, whether he had ever been aboard a ship before the day he needed one. His mother is not named anywhere; she enters the record at the far end of the journey, and only to leave it. His father is not named either, in the sense that matters to a biographer: what survives of the father is an occupation. He was a qadi, and the men of the family were qadis, and that is the whole of the inheritance the sources can be made to yield.

Even the name is a document with the personal parts missing. Al-Tanji is the town: the man of Tangier. Al-Lawati is the lineage: the Lawata, one of the Berber peoples of North Africa, a name that placed a family inside a genealogy the way a coat of arms placed a European one. The long chain of ibn in front of it is his father, his grandfather, his great-grandfather. Read the full name and you learn where he was from, whom he descended from, and what tribal confederation his ancestors belonged to. You learn nothing about him. That is not an accident of loss; it is how a name worked. A fourteenth-century Muslim gentleman's name was a statement of position within known structures, and the structures were what a stranger needed to know.

The Lawata were a Berber people, and that element of the name sits at a slight angle to everything else in it. The law he would be trained in was Arabic law, argued in Arabic, out of Arabic books, in a scholarly culture whose prestige language was not the language of the North African countryside. Berber-speaking families had been producing Arabic-writing jurists for a very long time by 1304, and there was nothing anomalous about it; a Lawati name in a legal household was a commonplace of the Maghrib, not a curiosity. But it does raise a question the sources will not answer, and it is characteristic of this life that they will not: we do not know what language was spoken in the house he grew up in. In the book he dictated he is an Arabic-speaking jurist and nothing else, and where he later needed interpreters he says so plainly. The childhood tongue is one of the very many things the text simply does not mention, because nobody at the time would have thought to ask.

The particular structure that mattered was the office his father held. A qadi in the Islamic west was a judge appointed by the ruler and removable by him, seated in a court that heard the ordinary traffic of a settled town: contracts, debts, disputed sales, the boundaries between neighboring properties. He drew up and validated marriage contracts and adjudicated their dissolution. He divided estates according to the fixed shares of the inheritance law, which is the most technically demanding arithmetic in the whole of Islamic jurisprudence and which no untrained man could perform. He supervised the pious endowments, the mortmain properties whose rents paid for mosques and fountains and the salaries of teachers, and he stood as guardian of last resort over the property of orphans and the affairs of those who had no one to act for them. He certified the testimony of professional witnesses. He was, in the plainest terms, the machinery by which a Muslim town's private life was made legally real, and he was that in Tangier exactly as he was that in Cairo or Damascus or, as this book will show, in places where a Muslim town had existed for less than a generation.

The office was hereditary in practice and not in law, which is a distinction worth making because it describes precisely the position of a boy in such a household. Nothing entitled him to the seat. Everything prepared him for it. The training was long, it was expensive in time if not in money, and it ran in families because families with the books and the connections could afford to spend a son's youth on it. The sons of qadis became qadis because they grew up among the people who examined candidates and the people who appointed them, and because the alternative careers available to a literate young man in a small Marinid port were considerably worse.

What that training consisted of can be described, and must be described carefully, because the record does not establish a single hour of it in his case. He would have begun with the Qur'an, memorized entire, in the way children of the Islamic west were taught it: written out on a wooden tablet, recited, erased, written again. He would have gone on to Arabic grammar, because the law is a science of reading and the reading is exacting. Then the law itself, in the Maliki tradition — the school of jurisprudence that had become the Maghrib's own, dominant across North Africa and al-Andalus and reaching south across the Sahara, and distinguished among the Sunni schools by the weight it gave to the inherited practice of Medina as evidence of what the Prophet's community had actually done. Its literature had a spine to it: the Muwatta of Malik ibn Anas, whose name the school carries; the Mudawwana, the great compilation out of Kairouan associated with Sahnun; the Risala of Ibn Abi Zayd al-Qayrawani, the compact handbook that generations of North African students worked through. That is what a Maliki student of the period read. Whether Ibn Battuta read any particular one of them, with whom, or how well, no source says, and no honest reconstruction can supply it. The most that can be said is that he emerged qualified enough that other men, repeatedly, in places on the far side of the world from Tangier and with no way of checking his references, put him on a bench and let him rule.

The mechanism that made that possible is the real subject of this chapter, and it is easy to miss because it has no modern equivalent. The qualification a Muslim scholar carried was not a degree issued by an institution. It was an ijaza: a license granted by a named teacher to a named student, authorizing that student to transmit a specific text on the teacher's authority, and naming the chain of men through whom the teacher had received it. The credential was therefore attached to a person and to a genealogy of persons, not to a building, a city, or a state. It could not be revoked by an administration, because no administration had issued it. It did not expire when its holder crossed a border, because it had never been valid by virtue of a border. A man who had it carried it in his own head and in the names he could recite, and it was recognized wherever the chain of names was recognized — which, by the fourteenth century, meant a very large part of the inhabited world.

This is the passport, and it is worth being precise about the territory it was good in. The community of Islam in 1304 was the largest connected space on earth. It ran from the Atlantic coast of Morocco to the South China Sea, and it was connected not merely in the sense that its parts were aware of each other but in the operational sense that a person could move across it. Arabic was its working language — the language of the law, of the contracts, of the prayers, and of a merchant's letter from Aden to Calicut. Its coinage was intelligible across it. Its calendar was the same everywhere in it. Its law recognized the same categories of transaction, so that a sale valid in Fez was a sale in Kilwa. And it possessed something no other space on earth then possessed: a standing institutional obligation to feed and house the stranger. Hospitality to travelers, and particularly to scholars and pilgrims, was not a private virtue in this world but an institution with buildings, endowments, and paid staff — hostels, lodges, colleges with rooms, rulers whose piety was measured partly by whom they entertained. A Maliki legal education was the ticket that admitted a man to it. The training that qualified him to sit as a judge in Tangier also qualified him to be fed in Damascus, employed in Delhi, and taken seriously in a sultan's audience hall on an island chain that had accepted Islam within living memory.

Nobody in Tangier would have described it that way. In Tangier it was simply the family business, and the family business had a local ceiling. The Marinid sultans ruled Morocco from Fez, and Fez was where the sultanate's endowed colleges were, where the great libraries were, and where careers were made; Tangier was a provincial port on the dynasty's northern edge, a garrison and a customs house on a strait that was a military frontier as well as a commercial one. Across the water the Muslim territory of the Iberian peninsula had contracted to the Nasrid emirate of Granada and the ground the Marinids themselves held on the northern shore, and the Christian kingdoms pressed on both. Ships and news came into the bay from the Mediterranean and from the Atlantic; pilgrims went east along the Maghrib road every year and some of them came back; the caravans that reached Fez came up from the far side of the Sahara. A boy in a judge's household would have heard about the world constantly and continuously, from people who had been in it, and would have understood without being told that Tangier was the place all of it was passing through on the way to somewhere else.

The town was old, and its whole history was about that stretch of water. The Romans had held it, and the empires that followed them along that coast; the Arab armies of the westward conquest came through it; and the force that carried Islam into the Iberian peninsula went from this coast under Tariq ibn Ziyad, whose name the rock on the far side has borne ever since. Tangier's significance was never agricultural and rarely local. It was a place armies and cargoes and pilgrims went through, and its inhabitants made their living from the going-through. That is a particular kind of childhood to have: everyone you meet is on the way somewhere, and the somewhere is always east.

East was also where the town's one scheduled connection to the whole system ran. Every year a party left for the pilgrimage — the obligation on every Muslim with the health and the means to discharge it — and the route from the far Maghrib was the long one, overland the length of North Africa or by sea and then overland, and a serious proportion of those who went did not return. The pilgrim who did return came home with the single most portable form of status available to a man of that world, and with a great deal of information. In a judge's household the annual departure would have been a fixed feature of the calendar, discussed the way a family in a naval town discusses sailings. When the moment came, the young Ibn Battuta did not do anything original. He did the thing his town had watched other men do every year of his life.

If he had stayed, the shape of the life is not hard to draw. He would have finished his studies, probably at Fez, taken a post as a deputy or a notary, married locally, waited, and in time been appointed to a bench in a town of about the size of the one he was born in. He would have judged sales and marriages and estates for the rest of his working life, taught a little, and been buried where his father was buried. It is not a small life; it is a respectable and useful one, and it is the life almost every young man in his position actually led. What makes it worth stating is that this is the only career the evidence shows him being trained for and the only one anyone around him is likely to have imagined for him. There is no sign of a restless child in the record, because there is no record of the child at all. The temptation, and it is the standing temptation of every book written about him, is to supply one — to invent the boy on the beach watching the sails and dreaming of the East. The sails were certainly there. The boy is a conjecture, and this book will not make it.

What can be said, and it is a good deal more interesting than the invented boy, is that the credential he was being handed was worth immensely more than the position it was designed to lead to. He was being fitted, in a provincial customs port, with the only qualification in the world that was honored from the Atlantic to the South China Sea. Every hour of grammar drill and every memorized chapter of the inheritance shares was, without anyone intending it, preparation for employment in courts nobody in Tangier had heard of. A European contemporary with a comparable education — a canon lawyer, say, trained at Bologna or Paris — held something valid across Latin Christendom, which was a fraction of the size and which had no equivalent institution of maintained hospitality to move him across it. The Maliki student in Tangier held a document, carried in his memory, redeemable across the largest zone of legal and linguistic mutual recognition that had ever existed. The provincial boy was holding a passport, and there is no reason to think he knew it.

He would find out. From the day he left, the journey ran for twenty-nine years, and he wrote nothing down while he made it. A modern calculation, performed on the itinerary he himself supplied and therefore proving nothing about the itinerary, puts the distance at roughly 117,000 km. He would be made a sultan's judge and a chief judge of a converted archipelago; he would be robbed, shipwrecked, feted, suspected of treason, and married and abandoned wives across three continents. He would buy and be given human beings and lose them at sea. And at the end of it he would sit down in Fez with Abu Abdallah Muhammad ibn Muhammad ibn Juzayy, an Andalusian man of letters supplied to him by the sultan Abu Inan Faris, and reconstruct the whole of it out of his head — with pages of an earlier traveler's book quietly folded in, unmarked, wherever the memory ran thin. He died in Morocco in 1368 or 1369. Where he is buried is not known.

The date on which this begins is 14 June 1325. He was twenty-one. Everything the record contains about the twenty-one years before it is very nearly what this chapter has already set down, and the rest of what has been set down here is not about him at all but about the world he was being fitted for. What the years produced cannot be seen in them at all; it can only be seen afterward, in the astonishing fact that the training given to a judge's son in a small port on the Strait turned out to be valid, without amendment and without translation, halfway around the world.