The young Moroccan lawyer chose not to venture as far as Sofala, which a merchant told him was several weeks’ sailing further south. The uncertainties of the weather between Sofala and Madagascar, the land of the heathen Waqwaqs, meant that he risked being unable to sail back across the equator with the arrival of the south-west monsoon. There was also the danger of cyclones in the southern part of the ocean. So when the monsoon changed, Ibn Battuta did not linger, because in the middle months of the year there was a likelihood of violent storms. He boarded another ship, which headed across the open sea to Arabia; from there he went on by a roundabout route to India.
Ibn Battuta’s journey to East Africa in 1331, his first venture into the arena of Indian Ocean civilization, provides an eye-witness account of the coast after a gap of several centuries. For him it was the turning point of his career. From now on his lifelong urge to find out what lay beyond the next mountain, past the next town, across the next sea, was to make him, in Islamic eyes, the doyen of adventurers in pre-modern times.
He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his lifespan between different lands, and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.
—Al-Mas’udi, The Meadows of Gold
WHAT DISTINGUISHES the memoirs of Ibn Battuta from many other humdrum travel diaries is not merely his flair for recording what is bizarre, exotic or absurd, but also the way he lays bare his personality: at times he is swashbuckling and boastful, at others vulnerable and indecisive, then ready to laugh at his own folly in inviting misfortune. After six centuries, in translation from the Arabic, his individuality asserts itself. His capacity for self-revelation is closely related to a gift for capturing in one or two sentences the manners and customs of other people.
His description of life aboard the big Chinese trading junks, which were more and more to be seen sailing to Indian Ocean ports, epitomizes his skill. Ibn Battuta writes approvingly, echoing Marco Polo, about the amenities for merchants: ‘Often a man will live in his cabin unknown to any of the others on board until they meet upon reaching some town.’ These cabins, consisting of several rooms and a bathroom, could be locked by the occupants, ‘who would take along with them slave girls and wives’. He adds a glimpse of lower-deck life: ‘The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they grow lettuces, vegetables and ginger in wooden tubs.’
In the Chinese custom, the most important figure in running these behemoths, with their twelve masts and four decks, was not the captain but a superintendent acting for the owner. In Ibn Battuta’s words, the superintendent was ‘like a great emir’, and when he went ashore he was preceded by archers and armed Abyssinians beating drums and blowing trumpets and bugles.
This mention of Abyssinians aboard Chinese ships in the fourteenth century is revealing, for the term always identified a person as coming from somewhere on the eastern side of Africa. Elsewhere, Ibn Battuta says Abyssinians were used throughout the Indian Ocean as armed guards on merchant ships; the presence of merely one was enough to frighten away pirates. He also tells of an Abyssinian slave named Badr, whose prowess in war was so phenomenal that he was made the governor of an Indian town: ‘He was tall and corpulent, and used to eat a whole sheep at a meal, and I was told that after eating he would drink about a pound and a half of ghee [clarified butter], following the custom of the Abyssinians in their own country.’
Many Africans were taken to India in the retinues of the Arab merchants who were settling in its ports during the fourteenth century. Others were transported to serve as palace guards. There was also a human flow in the opposite direction: Hindu merchants from the great port of Cambay, in north-west India, crossed the ocean to live in Kilwa, Zanzibar, Aden and ports on the Red Sea.
When Ibn Battuta reached India the fabric of its ancient culture was being torn to shreds. The entire sub-continent was under threat from the war-loving Turks of central Asia, who had invaded India through the mountain passes and the Afghan valleys of the north. One after another they were destroying the ancient Hindu kingdoms lying in their path. However, since the conquerors were Muslims, many doors were open to Ibn Battuta, and this enabled him to give a unique account of the tyranny with which his co-religionists were ruling amid the splendours of northern India. Since his hosts were not Arabs, he was able to view them fairly dispassionately.
By 1333, when Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi, the throne was occupied by Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq, who called himself by the grandiose title ‘Master of the World’.1 The sultan had murdered his father to gain power, and had his half-brother beheaded when he suspected him of disloyalty. Ibn Battuta’s experiences with the sultan during several years in Delhi were to contain all the menace of being trapped in a cage with a man-eating tiger.
Shortly before Ibn Battuta’s arrival, the sultan had depopulated his capital as a punishment for its citizens’ enmity towards him, made plain in written messages tossed every night into his audience hall. In his rage Muhammad ordered all the people of Delhi to leave at once for a distant region: then he decreed a search for anyone who had not obeyed. As Ibn Battuta tells its, the sultan’s slaves ‘found two men in the streets, one a cripple and the other blind’. The two were brought before the sultan, who ordered that the cripple should be fired to his death from a military catapult and the blind man should be dragged from Delhi to Dawlat Abad, forty days’ journey away. ‘He fell to pieces on the road and all of him that reached Dawlat Abad was his leg.’
Ibn Battuta makes a half-hearted attempt in his narrative to excuse the sultan for his savagery, by giving examples of his lavish treatment of strangers. For a time he enjoyed this generosity himself, but then it seems to have gone to his head, because by his own admission he began behaving in a reckless fashion. When the sultan decided to go hunting, he went too, hiring a vast retinue of grooms, bearers, valets and runners. Soon the constant extravagance of the young Moroccan judge became the talk of the court. As Ibn Battuta unashamedly relates, the ‘Master of the World’ eventually sent him three sacks, containing 55,000 gold dinars, to pay off his creditors. This may also have been the sultan’s way of making up for having executed a rebellious court official, the brother of a noblewoman named Hurnasab, whom Ibn Battuta married soon after reaching Delhi.
His volatile friendship with the sultan took a turn for the worse when Ibn Battuta went to stay as a penitent with Kamal al-Din, an ascetic Sufi imam known as the ‘Cave Man’, living underground on the outskirts of Delhi. The sultan distrusted the ‘Cave Man’ and eventually had him tortured and put to the sword. Before doing so he summoned Ibn Battuta and announced: ‘I have sent for you to go as my ambassador to the king of China, because I know your love of travel.’ His difficult guest was quick to accept the proposition; each of them was glad that they would soon be seeing the last of the other.
As a prelude to departure, Ibn Battuta divorced Hurnasab, who had just borne him a daughter. Clearly, domesticity counted for little beside the task of leading an imposing expedition across land and sea. Fifteen envoys had lately arrived from the Great Khan of