ALAMYSailing across the Black Sea to the
Crimea, Ibn Battuta ventured up the
Volga, then travelled south through the
Balkans. Reaching Constantinople in
1332, the Moroccan did what he did
best and indulged in some more
shameless social climbing. As an erudite
young scholar and man of letters, he
managed to secure an audience with the
Byzantine emperor Andronikos III
Palaiologos, who gave him a robe of
honour and assigned him a horse on
which, to the accompaniment of
“trumpets, fifes and drums”, he was
paraded around the city to admire its
“marvellous and rare sights”. He was
made to sing for his supper and finery,
quizzed by the curious emperor on
Islamic cities including Jerusalem,
Damascus, Cairo and Baghdad.
Though impressed by its great size,
Ibn Battuta considered the Byzantine
capital more like a dozen individual
villages separated by fields than a single
city. He caught the unmistakable whiff
of imperial decline – broken bridges,
filthy markets – in his description of the
city, counterbalanced by a recognition of
its powerful Christian identity, heritage
and practice, not least in the Hagia
Sophia, the great basilica church that he
was told contained “thousands” of
monks and priests.
That autumn, Ibn Battuta set out
east again for central Asia, travelling via
Bukhara to reach Samarkand, which he
thought “one of the largest and most
perfectly beautiful cities in the
world”. Of its large palaces
and impressive monuments,
though, he saw that “the
greater part are ruined and
a portion of the city is also
devastated – it has no wall
or gates and there are no
gardens outside the city
itself ”. Such scars were the
legacy of ruinous Mongol
invasions unleashed by
Genghis Khan a century
before. Ibn Battuta’s visit in 1333 came
just a few decades before the arrival of
Timur (often known as Tamerlane),
who chose this ancient Silk Road city as
his capital, and developed it into a great
cultural and commercial centre.
The Moroccan was particularly
excited to visit the tomb of Kusam
ibn Abbas, cousin of the Prophet
Muhammad, reputed to have arrived
here in 676. Brimming with missionar y
fervour, Kusam was on a mission to
convert Zoroastrian fire-worshippers
to Islam. The local population did not
take kindly to this foreign preacher,
however, and he was apprehended
and beheaded. Legend has it that he
picked up his head and jumped
down a well, where he has remained
ever since, ready to resume his work.
Arabs venerated him, and the tomb
attracted many of the faithful over the
centuries – and still does today.
From central Asia, Ibn Battuta
pushed south-east, in 1334 arriving in
India where he finagled his way into
the service of Muhammad bin
Tughluq, sultan of Delhi.
Tradition dictated that
visitors should bestow
valuable gifts on the sul-
tan, so Ibn Battuta
borrowed goods from
an Iraqi merchant,
and presented 30horses, camels, arrows and slaves.
The return on his investment was
immediate: the position of chief qadi,
a huge signing-on bonus of 12,000
dinars and a fabulous annual salary
of 12,000 dinars. He was rich.
Working for the notoriously cruel
ruler was no picnic, though. The sultan
was “far too free in shedding blood”,
Ibn Battuta reckoned, a firm believer
in hideously imaginative torture.
Criminals were skinned alive or thrown
into pens to be gored by elephants with
tusk-mounted swords. Hundreds were
brought in chains daily to the audience
hall, the Moroccan reported, to be
executed, tortured or beaten. At one
point, Ibn Battuta himself was suspected
of disloyalty and was forced to abandon
his possessions, don a beggar’s rags
and live with a hermit in a cave for five
months until things calmed down.
One can easily imagine his relief when,
in 1341, the sultan appointed him
ambassador to the Mongol court in
China, offering an escape route from
a paranoid, disintegrating state.Mission to China
The journey had barely begun when
Ibn Battuta’s party was attacked by
4,000 Hindu rebels. Then, chased
by horsemen, he was overrun and
robbed, narrowly escaping death.
More scrapes followed, including a
shipwreck resulting in the loss of his
companions and the death of a slave
girl pregnant with his child. Down
but not out, Ibn Battuta decided to
continue east alone. Sailing on, he
stopped in the Maldives for nine
months, where he became chief
judge (again), joined the royal family
and took another clutch of wives.
After another diversion to Sri Lanka,
where he hobnobbed with
the king and climbed the holy
summit of Adam’s Peak,
in 1346 he docked at the port
of Chittagong, in what’s nowThe journey east had
barely begun when
4,000 Hindu rebels
attacked Ibn Battuta's
par t y. He was over-
run and robbed
JOURNEYS In the footsteps of Ibn Battuta’s journeys across Africa and Asia
Byzantine emperor
Andronikos III Palaiologos
(1328–41) , who quizzed
Ibn Battuta about the
great cities of Islam