Another Man's Handwriting

Twenty-nine years of travel and not one page written at the time. No diary, no notebook, no letters home, no log kept at sea, nothing set down by the man who was there. What survives is a court commission. In Fez, the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris wanted a gift for his court and assigned a professional Andalusian stylist, Ibn Juzayy, to take the fifty-year-old traveler's dictation. The stylist supplied the poetry, the rhetorical framing and the ornament, and where the memory ran dry he quietly imported pages from Ibn Jubayr, who had described Damascus in the 1180s, and did not say so.

The argument of this book is that the journey and the book are two different objects, and that confusing them is the oldest error in the subject. Ibn Battuta was not a fraud. He was a rememberer under commission, working from a memory thirty years deep beside a professional whose job was to make the result readable, and the consequences of that arrangement are not evenly distributed across the text. So the evidence is graded chapter by chapter, on the page. The excursion north to Bolghar is treated as very probably fabricated. The claimed journey to the Yuan court will not fit any workable chronology and puts an emperor in the wrong place; the southern Chinese ports are handled separately and allowed; Constantinople is left unresolved. Against that: there is no other account by a visitor of imperial Mali under Mansa Sulayman, the seven years at Delhi are the best-corroborated stretch in the work, and Damascus in the plague summer of 1348 is testimony from a man who was in the street. Chapter 18 is placed at the end of the traveling rather than in a note. He bought, sold, married and abandoned enslaved people across three continents for thirty years, and the caravan he left Takedda with in 1353 included six hundred enslaved women being walked north across the Sahara. He recorded the number without comment because he expected none. None of them is named in his book.