1346, Quanzhou, China.
Ibn Battuta found China a land of wonders
an upside-down place where people used paper instead of coin
and even beggars wore silk.
"China was beautiful," he wrote, "But
it did not please me." Because while Ibn Battuta had traveled widely,
most of the communities he visited were Muslim
or Muslim-ruled. And he rarely ventured outside that bubble.
Where minority religions existed, they were at least other
monotheists, like Christians or Jews.
The Chinese, by contrast, were polytheistic
and worshipped what Ibn Battuta considered idols.
Confucian scholars were dismissive of Islam, and the population
ate pork and cremated their dead.
"This disturbed me so much," he wrote, "that I stayed indoors
most of the time, and only went out when necessary.
During my stay in China, whenever I saw Muslims,
I always felt as though I were meeting my own family
and close kinsmen." Perhaps it was time to go home.
But when he did so, death
followed.
Ibn Battuta didn't have to look far to find other Muslims
in Yuan China. Indeed, for over a century,
the Mongol Yuan had kept an open door policy
that invited foreigners to settle and form trading villages.
While in these Islamic enclaves, he even ran into other scholars
he'd met during his travels. Because
as you've probably understood by now, Ibn Battuta
was not an explorer. During
his travels, he'd made his way along well-known pilgrimage
and trade routes. The Mongol conquest and the peace
and security they created had fostered an unprecedented network
of maritime and overland trade routes.
Few people traveled to the extent that Ibn Battuta did,
but he was far from the only person to journey from Africa to East Asia. In China he met
Syrians, Egyptians, and even a man who grew up
40 miles from him, back in Morocco. Because you see,
the world of the mid 14th century was an interconnected world.
One where goods and people could go from one side of Africa
and Eurasia to the other. And that
would ultimately destroy this period of peace and interchange.
Because in central Asia, a terrible disease was emerging.
A disease that caused painful buboes on the body, extreme
headaches, and delirium. An even more aggressive form,
the airborne pneumatic variety, caused victims to cough blood
and killed within hours. It was a disease
borne by flease. Fleas that lived on rats,
an animal that liked to infest ships
or stow away on caravans and wagons. In other words,
an insect that infested all modes of transport Ibn Battuta
had taken on his long road. When he
boarded his ship back to India, he had no idea
that he was seeing the last days of Yuan China. Bubonic
Plague would lead to the dynasty's collapse and sow chaos
on the peaceful trade routes of the
four Mongol kingdoms. Indeed, Ibn Battuta
would begin to see that collapse himself. He retraced his route to India,
and considered going back to Delhi,
but word reached him that the sultanate was tearing itself apart.
And Ibn Battuta was worried that the sultan would execute him
for his failed mission. So, he made another plan.
A little... ah, you know, what is that thing called?
Oh yeah! A side trip. To Mecca,
to make the Hajj one last time. But by the
time he made it to the Arabian Peninsula, the pilgrimage season
had ended. He would need to wait a year before it started again.
So, rather than just hang out, he took another
separate side trip, a side-side-trip,
visiting Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt
to see how things had changed in the time he'd been away.
And he was shocked at what he found. The great Il Khan,
the man he'd traveled with, was dead, likely from plague.
He'd left an empty throne, several ongoing wars,
and his Mongol and Turkish generals
were ripping the land apart in a series of succession conflicts.
It was the first dark cloud
in what would be a storm of sadness. He arrived in
Damascus to find that the son he'd left behind
with one of his many ex-wives had died in childhood, and
a separate message told him that his father had passed away
15 years before. Saddened,
he took a trip to Aleppo. But as he traveled, a great
curtain was being pulled across Syria. The Black
Plague descended on the Middle East, chasing him on the road.
He fled back to Damascus, but found the oasis
city ground to a halt, with two thousand dying
every day and the populace in terror. As in Europe,
the Islamic world believed the disease came from a religious,
rather than medical, source. But all Christian Europe
interpreted it as punishment for human sin, and greeted
the plague with apocalyptic sermons, self-flagellation,
and massacres of their Jewish neighbors.
Islamic cities looked on it as a manifestation of the
divine will. To them, it was an aspect of God's
unknowable plan that must simply be endured
with humility. Ibn Battuta saw the
residents of Damascus fast for three days, followed by a packed
day of prayer and supplication at the mosque. Afterward,
the multi-ethnic populace parade through the city streets
together, holding aloft copies of their holy texts.
Muslims carried the Quran, Christians the Bible, and Jews
the Torah, all with tears, imploring their god
to stop the suffering. Damascus would lose
more than 30,000 citizens to the disease. Its streets choked
with funeral parades, corpses left uncovered
due to the city running out of burial shrouds. Ibn Battuta
fled to Cario, passing empty villages and bodies
along the road. And when he arrived, he found the great city
with a population of half a million deserted
by its leaders and losing 24,000 residents each day.
Plague would eventually kill 200,000,
including most of the army officers, sending the
Mamluk sultanate into decline.
But in 1348, the worst year of the plague,
Ibn Battuta made it to Mecca and fulfilled his goal
of making the Hajj one last time.
It must have made him think of his first pilgrimage, when he left Tangier
at the age of 21, freshly graduated and
never having left home. Now he was a 45-year-old man.
"I was moved by memories of my homeland,"
he wrote, "affection for my family and dear friends who
drew me toward my land, which in my opinion was better
than any other country." Yet when he arrived home
in Tangier, he found his mother had died of plague as well.
And days later, he was on the road again. At a loss
for what to do, he volunteered as a soldier to defend
the Rock of Gibraltar from a Spanish siege,
but arrived to find the battle already over. Instead
he toured Muslim Spain before returning home. But that
was not the end of his journey. The Sultan of Morocco,
hearing of his voyages, appointed him ambassador
to the golden empire of Mali. Though that's
a tale you'll have to hear about over in our Empire of Mali series,
because this dude went everywhere.
And when he returned, the sultan gave Ibn Battuta a new
command: to dictate his story to the poet
Ibn Juzayy. There could be a record of all he saw
in the Muslim world. The result was not a perfect book.
Ibn Battuta worked from memory,
and as a result got details wrong,
misremembered dates, and mixed up some events. So,
either Ibn Battuta himself or Ibn Juzayy decided to fill in
the blanks by copying sections of other travel books,
even inventing some journeys so the book would be a full compendium
of the whole Muslim world. For instance, Ibn Battuta
likely never made it out of southern China, nor did he travel
far north into Russia as the book claims. And Rob
will talk about how we know that in our lies episode.
But despite all these issues, the travels
is an extraordinary document, one that,
despite its contradictions, exaggerations, and ocassionally
confused timelines, gives historians
an unprecedented look at the Muslim world of the 14th century
and how its trade networks operated.
Given that, it's almost anti-climactic to say that when they were
originally published, they received little attention.
In fact, Ibn Battuta's fellow judges often called him
an uneducated liar. We know almost nothing about
the rest of his life, only that he likely settled down as a mid-level
qadi, probably married again,
if precedent had anything to say about it, and died without fanfare.
It's ironic then, that today Ibn Battuta's personal fame
eclipses any of the rulers and even some of the kingdoms
he visited. While few people around the world have heard of the Il Khanate
or Mohammed Tublo, Ibn Battuta's life
has been the subject of television dramas, movies,
and even video games. You can visit Ibn Battuta Mall
in Dubai where the different sections are themed to his
journeys. Fly into Tangier and you'll land
in Ibn Battuta airport, eat at Ibn Battuta restaurants,
visit an Ibn Battuta festival, and even see
an unmarked tomb that's said to be
his final resting place. He even has a crater on the Moon.
"I have indeed, praise be to God, attained
my desire in this world," he wrote, "which was
to travel through the earth. And I have attained in this respect
what no other person has attained to my knowledge."
Happy travels, friends. See ya next time.
Legendary thanks to Ahmed Ziad Turk, Casey Muscha,
Dominic Valenciana, Gunnar Clovis, Kyle Murgatroyd, and Orels1.