An emotional moment came when he met in Fuchow (Fuzhou) a Muslim doctor from Ceuta, the Mediterranean port only a few miles from his Tangier birthplace. At this encounter on the far side of the world they both wept. The doctor had prospered greatly in China: ‘He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave girls, and presented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.’ Some years later Ibn Battuta was to meet the doctor’s brother in West Africa.
Ibn Battuta returned safely by sea from China to Calicut, and there faced a delicate decision. At one moment he felt duty-bound to return to Delhi to report to the sultan all that had happened, then the idea grew too alarming: ‘on second thoughts I had some fears about doing so, so I re-embarked and twenty-eight days later reached Dhofar.’ This was in the familiar territory of Arabia. From there he began making his way home to Tangier by way of Hormuz, Baghdad and Damascus (with a detour for one more pilgrimage to Mecca).
Shortly before he reached Tangier his mother, long a widow, died from the Black Death.7 Much had changed in Morocco during the quarter of a century he had been away and little attention was spared for a weatherbeaten qadi whom most people had forgotten. Anxieties were running deep about events across the Strait of Gibraltar, because after almost 700 years Islam was yielding its control, step by step, of southern Spain.
Seemingly at a loss as to what he should do next, Ibn Battuta crossed to the European side of the Mediterranean and joined briefly in the jihad against the advancing Spaniards. His experiences there were far from happy: in one incident, Christian bandits almost took him prisoner near ‘a pretty little town’ called Marbella. He soon returned to the safety of Morocco and decided on one last adventure. He headed southwards across the Sahara desert, along trade routes pioneered by his Berber ancestors in Roman times.
He travelled for another two years (1352–53), covering thousands of miles by camel, donkey and on foot, visiting Mali and other powerful West African kingdoms. It was the region from which the fabulous Mansa Musa had emerged twenty-five years earlier to astound Egypt with his wealth. This part of Africa had been won for Islam, but it was strikingly different from the cities Ibn Battuta had visited two decades before on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. There the rulers were Arabs, controlling an African population but holding firm to a non-African culture. In West Africa the culture was indigenous, and the rulers had adapted Islam to fit their own traditions.
He was astonished by the riches of West Africa, at that time the world’s greatest gold producer, and by the scholarship he found in Timbuktu, on the bend of the Niger river.8 He commented: ‘The Negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust and possess a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people … There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or violent men.’
Sadly, his conclusions about the geography of Africa were wildly astray, because he believed that the Niger, flowing eastwards at Timbuktu, later became the Nile, which he had seen flowing northwards in Egypt. (In this error he was following the theory of the twelfth-century writer al-Idrisi, and many other Arab geographers, that there was a ‘western Nile’ flowing from the direction of the Atlantic.) Ibn Battuta may even have thought that the Nile was also joined to the Zambezi. Recalling his experiences in East Africa he said that Sofala was a month’s journey from the gold-producing land of Yufi. When he came to describe what he believed to be the course of the Nile he declared: ‘It continues from Muli to Yufi, one of the greatest countries of the black people, whose ruler is the most considerable of kings of the whole region.’
He went on: ‘Yufi cannot be visited by any white man, because they would kill him before he got there.’ Since Ibn Battuta regarded himself as ‘white’ in both colour and culture this was simply a way of explaining why he had failed to make a trip to see the gold-mines, the subject of so much speculation.
When Ibn Battuta finally returned from West Africa to Fez, the Moroccan capital, he was able to claim that he had visited every region of the world where Muslims either ruled or had settled. Many people in the court insisted that it was impossible for one man to have travelled so far and survived so many dangers. These arguments were silenced by the sultan’s chief minister, who gave Ibn Battuta several scribes to whom he could dictate as he pleased, as well as a young court secretary, Muhammad ibn Juzayy. It was Ibn Juzayy, proud of his own modest journeys abroad, who wrote in admiration of his elderly charge: ‘It must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age.’
The old adventurer took his time, living near the palace, sifting through his memories and dictating to the scribes. These labours seem to have been stretched out over almost three years. At times he faltered in remembering the names of people and places, but could still recall vividly those parts of India where the women were especially beautiful and ‘famous for their charms in intercourse’. Ibn Battuta was eventually despatched to be the law-giver in an unidentified Moroccan town. No more is on record about him, except that he is thought to have died in 1377 in the ancient city of Marrakesh, aged seventy-three.
By that time a momentous change had overtaken those distant lands through which he and Marco Polo had travelled. The Great Khan was no more, for Mongol rule in China had ended as swiftly as it began. The people whose mounted armies had swept irresistibly across Asia and much of Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century now vanished from the world stage. The Ming dynasty had taken power in the ‘Central Country’ and would hold it for the next 300 years.
Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch
Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.
—Chinese envoy, addressing the Sultan of Aden, 1420
THE DRIVING FORCE behind China’s most dramatic display of sea-power in its history was a singular figure, the Grand Admiral Zheng He. Described by contemporaries as handsome, tall and burly, with fierce eyes, long earlobes, and a voice ‘as loud as a bell’, Zheng was also a eunuch. They called him the Three-Jewel Eunuch (or, more formally, the Eunuch of the Three Treasures, a title derived from Buddhism which is literally translated as ‘the Three Jewels of Pious Ejaculation’). Yet he was not a Buddhist, his original surname was not Zheng, and ethnically he was not of Chinese descent.
He was born in 1371 in the south-western Kunyang county, in the province of Yunnan. Kunyang is remote from the sea, but his family is thought to have originated even further away, beyond the Great Wall in a distant part of central Asia, and to have come to Yunnan with the Mongols. At all events, they were Muslims, both his father and grandfather having made pilgrimages to Mecca – a great achievement at that time. The family name was Ma, a common one among Muslims in China, and the boy had an elder brother and four sisters. When he was born the Mongols were still holding Yunnan, but were finally driven out by the armies of the Ming emperor Hongwu in 1382.
This was to be the turning-point in the life of the Ma family’s eleven-year-old son. A visiting general chose him, for his looks and his intelligence, to be taken to Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Once in Nanjing, he was made a page to the prince of Yan, the future emperor Yongle. He was given the new surname of Zheng, and castrated.
The creation of eunuchs to be the personal attendants of China’s rulers was a tradition, dating back to the earliest empires. At first only criminals were castrated, and were then sent to serve in the palace; this was called gongxing, palace punishment. Gradually the stigma was removed. Eunuchs were found to be unwaveringly loyal, never