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Biography
Moroccan

Ibn Battuta

1304 — 1368

Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta was a fourteenth-century Moroccan scholar and traveller whose Rihla — dictated to the Granadan scholar Ibn Juzayy after three decades of journeying — is the most extensive pre-modern travel account in existence. He traversed approximately 75,000 miles across the Islamic world, from West Africa to China, Southeast Asia to the Volga River, providing an unparalleled firsthand account of the medieval Dar al-Islam.

Past sales0
PeriodMedieval & Renaissance
NationalityMoroccan
1. Biography

A short life of the author

Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta (1304–1368/9) was born in Tangier, Morocco, into a family of Islamic legal scholars. At twenty-one, he set out on the hajj to Mecca — and did not return home for twenty-four years. His journeys took him across North Africa, the Horn of Africa, West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and China. When he finally returned to Morocco, the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris commissioned the scholar Ibn Juzayy to record his account, which became the Rihla (Travels) — formally titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling.

The Rihla

The Rihla is the longest and most geographically extensive personal travel narrative of the pre-modern world. Ibn Battuta travelled roughly 75,000 miles — far more than Marco Polo — and his account covers the entire Islamic world of the fourteenth century: courts, mosques, caravanserais, legal systems, trade routes, and the daily lives of people from Timbuktu to Hangzhou. The work is an invaluable source for historians of the medieval Islamic world, though scholars have noted that some sections appear to borrow from earlier travel accounts, and certain claimed visits (particularly to Bulghar on the Volga) have been debated.

Collecting Ibn Battuta

Manuscripts of the Rihla are held in major libraries (the Bibliothèque nationale de France possesses the most important copies). For modern collectors, the key editions are: H.A.R. Gibb’s translation for the Hakluyt Society (1958–1971, 3 volumes) — a scholarly landmark; Tim Mackintosh-Smith’s abridged translation Travels with a Tangerine (2001, John Murray) and its sequels; and Ross Dunn’s The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (1986, University of California Press), the standard modern biography. First editions of the Hakluyt Society translation are uncommon and bring $200–$500 for the set.