Ibn Battuta in India
Ibn Battuta reached Delhi around 1334 and spent eight years in the service of a sultan who terrified him. He had left Tangier in 1325 at twenty-one intending to make the pilgrimage to Mecca, and did not return home for twenty-four years, travelling something like 120,000 kilometres — a distance nobody exceeded before the steam age. Muhammad bin Tughlaq was the wealthiest ruler in the Muslim world and among the most erratic. He had moved the entire population of Delhi 1,100 kilometres south to Daulatabad and back, and had issued a token currency of brass and copper that was forged so widely it destroyed the treasury. Ibn Battuta was appointed qadi of Delhi at an enormous salary despite speaking little Persian and being unfamiliar with the Hanafi law he was to administer. His account records the sultan's generosity and his executions with equal attention, and the anxiety of a court where both were possible in the same week — he was himself suspected of association with a rebellious Sufi and placed under guard. He was sent in 1341 as ambassador to the Yuan court in China, was shipwrecked, robbed, separated from the embassy, and never reported back. He went on to the Maldives, Sri Lanka, Bengal, Sumatra and Quanzhou, and later to Mali across the Sahara. The Rihla was dictated in Morocco in 1355 to a scholar who wrote it up, and it borrows from earlier writers in places. It is the best single description of the fourteenth-century Islamic world.
- Year: 1334 CE
- Category: Exploration
