59 Fun Facts About Ibn Battuta

A crater named after Ibn Battuta lies on which body of the Solar System?

The Moon. The 11 km crater in the Sea of Fertility was plain Goclenius A until 1976, when astronomers renamed it after the traveller.

Ibn Battuta is often called the Muslim world's answer to which earlier traveller?

Marco Polo. The Venetian died the year before Ibn Battuta set out, and the Moroccan went on to cover far more ground, some 120,000 km, yet his account stayed unknown in Europe until the 1800s.

Camels carried Ibn Battuta across deserts later on, but he left home in 1325 riding which animal?

A donkey. On the road across North Africa he fell so ill with fever that he was tied into the saddle to keep from falling off, and kept going.

In the Anatolian city of Konya, Ibn Battuta visited the tomb of which Persian poet?

Rumi. The tale he heard there says the poet was a professor who walked out of his own lecture to follow a sweet-seller, vanished for years and came back speaking only in Persian verse.

Which ships did Ibn Battuta admire in Indian ports for their four decks, lockable cabins and private lavatories?

Junks from China carried a thousand men, he wrote, and a merchant could live unseen in his locked cabin for a whole voyage while the sailors, whose children lived aboard, grew vegetables and ginger in wooden tubs.

Aged 21, how did Ibn Battuta say he set out from home in 1325?

Alone, he wrote, with no companion to cheer him and no caravan to join; fear of robbers soon changed that, and he crossed most of North Africa in the company of other travellers.

What did Ibn Battuta report the Chinese using for money in place of metal coins?

Paper notes the size of a palm, stamped with the ruler's seal, did all the buying and selling; a shopper who offered a silver coin in the bazaar was ignored until he changed it.

Ibn Battuta's first marriage ended soon after his dispute with whom?

His father-in-law, a Tunisian official in the same caravan, fell out with him after Tripoli, so he parted from the bride and married a Fez scholar's daughter instead, feasting the whole caravan for a day.

Which wonder of the ancient world did Ibn Battuta visit in 1326, finding one of its faces in ruins?

The Lighthouse of Alexandria could still be entered in 1326, though one face had fallen; when he came back in 1349 it was so far gone that he could not even reach the door.

Cairo, when Ibn Battuta arrived in 1326, was the capital of which state?

The Mamluk Sultanate was run by former slave soldiers who had seized Egypt from their own masters and then driven the Mongols out of Syria, which kept the roads safe for travellers like him.

What forced Ibn Battuta to turn back at the Red Sea port of Aydhab?

A local rebellion: the ruling family had risen against the sultan's governor and sunk ships, so he went back to Cairo, just as a holy man on the Nile had warned him he would.

In which city did Ibn Battuta spend Ramadan in 1326 before joining the pilgrim caravan south to Medina?

Damascus held him for the rest of the fasting month: he studied with its scholars, lay ill with fever in a professor's house and still found time to marry again before the caravan left.

After his first hajj, Ibn Battuta toured Iraq and Persia, then ruled by which Mongol state?

The Ilkhanate was in its last years: he rode for ten days in the caravan of its young ruler Abu Sa'id, whose death in 1335 left Persia to break apart in civil war.

Which southern Persian city did Ibn Battuta find flourishing because the Mongols had never sacked it?

Shiraz lay far to the south and its ruler had bought the Mongols off with tribute, so refugees from the ruined northern cities poured in and set off a flowering of poetry and art.

Which East African port did Ibn Battuta find at the height of its wealth, exporting fine cloth to Egypt?

Mogadishu's young men rowed out to every arriving ship, each claiming a merchant as his guest; as a scholar, Ibn Battuta was instead lodged by the sultan and sent food from the palace three times a day.

Kilwa, the island town Ibn Battuta reached off East Africa, grew rich shipping which metal from Zimbabwe?

Gold from Zimbabwe reached the coast at Sofala and passed through Kilwa, whose sultan, Ibn Battuta wrote, was nicknamed 'the generous' for his gifts and often raided the mainland for booty.

Which Delhi sultan, known for lavish gifts and bloody punishments alike, gave Ibn Battuta a rich post at his court?

Muhammad bin Tughluq showered him with money, then put him under guard for his friendship with a Sufi who had defied the throne; he gave away his goods and lived as a hermit for months until the danger passed.

Anatolia's fityan brotherhoods, Ibn Battuta found, pooled their daily wages to do what?

Host travellers: members brought each day's earnings to the lodge to buy food for guests, and two brotherhoods once drew lots for the right to host him.

Which Ottoman ruler, son of the dynasty's founder Osman, had just captured Iznik when Ibn Battuta arrived?

Orhan, he wrote, was the greatest and richest of the Turkmen kings, yet never stayed a month in one town: he spent his time riding between nearly a hundred fortresses to keep them in repair.

At the Genoese port of Kaffa, which unfamiliar sound so alarmed Ibn Battuta that he had the Quran recited from a minaret?

Church bells rang on all sides an hour after he arrived, and he had never heard any before; the defiant call to prayer brought the town's Muslim judge running in armour, fearing for the visitors' safety.

Ibn Battuta described a northern 'Land of Darkness' reached only on sledges pulled by which animals?

Dogs, because their claws gripped ice that neither man nor beast could walk on; once there, merchants left goods on the snow overnight and came back to find furs in their place, never seeing who took them.

Ibn Battuta reached Constantinople escorting pregnant Princess Bayalun home to give birth; whose wife was she?

Uzbeg Khan of the Golden Horde sent her off with thousands of horsemen; once across the frontier she dropped the Muslim call to prayer, drank wine and, her attendants said, ate pork.

Entering Hagia Sophia would have required Ibn Battuta to do what?

Bow to a cross: an old monk who had walked him through the courtyard told him the rule could not be waived, so the Muslim jurist stayed outside and wrote up only the exterior.

Which Central Asian city did Ibn Battuta rank among the largest and most beautiful in the world?

Samarkand earned that praise even though most of its riverside palaces, and much of the city itself, still lay in ruins a century after the Mongols sacked it.

Ibn Battuta wrote that the Hindu Kush means 'Hindu-slayer' because so many of which travellers froze in its passes?

Indian slaves, boys and girls marched north for sale, died there of cold in large numbers, he wrote; it is the earliest explanation of the name on record, though dictionaries now call it a likely folk etymology.

Which now-famous snack did Ibn Battuta describe at the Delhi court as a fried pastry of minced meat, nuts and spices?

Samosa: he called it sambusak, its name across the Middle East, and the meat-and-nut pastry is thought to have reached India with cooks from Persia and Central Asia who served the Delhi sultans.

Which Hindu ritual did Ibn Battuta witness and describe in detail while living in India?

Sati (widow burning) was voluntary, he noted, and in the sultan's lands needed royal permission; but a widow who refused, he added, lived on in coarse clothes, despised by her own family.

A Chinese embassy asked Delhi's sultan for permission to rebuild what, sacked by his army in the Himalayan foothills?

A Buddhist temple: the sultan refused, saying only those who paid the poll tax could build temples in Muslim lands, yet he answered with richer gifts than he had received and made Ibn Battuta his envoy.

At which Indian port did a storm wreck the ship carrying Ibn Battuta's embassy gifts while he prayed ashore?

Calicut, where Vasco da Gama would later land: the treasure ship broke up and its passengers drowned, and the vessel with Ibn Battuta's own goods sailed off, leaving him ten dinars and the carpet he had slept on.

In which island nation did Ibn Battuta serve as chief judge and marry into the ruling family?

The Maldives, once Buddhist, wanted a judge who knew Arabic and the Quran, so its rulers plied him with pearls and jewellery and saw to it that no ship would take him away.

Which local custom did Ibn Battuta try to ban as chief judge of an Indian Ocean island nation?

Women going topless in public was the one custom he could not end: he ordered them to cover up and, by his own account, failed, though he did have men whipped for missing Friday prayers.

Which Sri Lankan mountain did Ibn Battuta climb as a pilgrim?

Adam's Peak is holy to several faiths: Muslims see Adam's footprint in a hollow near its summit, Buddhists the Buddha's and Hindus Shiva's; Ibn Battuta hauled himself up its cliffs on iron chains.

Ibn Battuta trekked for a month to meet the Sufi saint Shah Jalal near Sylhet, in which present-day country?

Bangladesh: Shah Jalal, tall, lean and living in a cave with a single goat for milk, had already sent disciples out to meet the Moroccan on the road, days before he arrived.

On which island did a Muslim sultan host Ibn Battuta on his way to China?

Sumatra's port sultanate of Samudra Pasai hosted him for about two weeks behind wooden walls; its sultan then sent him on in one of his own ships, and another carried him home from China.

In which country is Urduja, the warrior princess Ibn Battuta described in Tawalisi, celebrated as a national heroine?

The Philippines claims Urduja for Pangasinan, where the governor's residence bears her name, yet scholars have placed her realm anywhere from Vietnam to Sulawesi, and some doubt it ever existed.

Ibn Battuta arrived in China in 1345 at which port, known to Muslims as Zaitun?

Quanzhou's Arabic name Zaitun means olives, yet he found none there or anywhere else in China; what the port did hold was about a hundred great ships and small craft past counting.

Which Chinese city on a lake ringed by hills did Ibn Battuta call one of the largest he had seen?

Hangzhou's governor treated him to a mock sea battle on the canals, fought with oranges and lemons, and to a conjurer whose boy assistant climbed a rope thrown into the air and vanished from sight.

Ibn Battuta wrongly wrote that which Chinese export was made from coal, the 'earth' he saw burned as fuel?

Porcelain, he said, came from the clay the Chinese burned in place of charcoal; coal was so new to him that he described how they burned it, kneaded the cinders with water and burned it again.

In China, Ibn Battuta asked after the rampart that the Quran's Dhul-Qarnayn built to pen in which peoples?

Gog and Magog's rampart lay sixty days' journey away, he was told, yet nobody he met had seen it or knew anyone who had; Arab geographers had long placed it at the far north-east of the world.

What catastrophe did Ibn Battuta run into in Syria and Egypt in 1348 on his way home?

The Black Death was raging in one Syrian city, where he watched the people fast for three days and then walk out together, Muslims, Jews and Christians, holy books in hand, to pray for relief.

In 1350 Ibn Battuta sailed to help defend which port from Alfonso XI of Castile, who died before he arrived?

Gibraltar no longer needed him: Alfonso had died in his siege camp and the threat had lifted, so the volunteer turned tourist, narrowly missing an ambush that seized a party of travellers riding just ahead.

At the Saharan village of Taghaza, Ibn Battuta found the buildings made from slabs of what?

Salt was all Taghaza had: workers dug it out in slabs that camels carried south, where it was worth several times more by the time it reached Mali's capital, and he hated the flies and the brackish water.

Travelling through West Africa, Ibn Battuta mistook which river for the Nile?

The Niger, he assumed, was the upper Nile, an old belief that long outlived him: Europeans were still sending explorers to trace the river's real course more than four centuries later.

Mansa Suleyman, the Mali emperor Ibn Battuta met, was the brother of which ruler?

Mansa Musa's hajj had made Mali a byword for generosity, so Ibn Battuta was scornful when his brother's welcome gift turned out to be three loaves, a piece of fried beef and a gourd of yogurt.

Which large animal did Ibn Battuta first encounter on the journey from Mali's capital to Timbuktu?

Hippopotamuses: he saw a herd of huge beasts on the bank by moonlight and took them for elephants until they slid into the river; local boatmen, he learned, hunted them with spears tied to strong cords.

Ibn Battuta travelled downriver from Timbuktu to which trading city in a canoe carved from a single tree?

Gao was then a rich river port of the Mali Empire; within a century it broke away, and it became the capital of Songhai, the empire that replaced Mali as West Africa's great power.

To whom did Ibn Battuta dictate the story of his travels after returning to Morocco in 1354?

Ibn Juzayy, a young Andalusian poet, was hired by the sultan to turn the old traveller's memories into polished prose; he added verses of his own and filled gaps with passages from earlier travel books.

The book of Ibn Battuta's travels copied its descriptions of Mecca and Medina from which earlier Andalusian traveller?

Ibn Jubayr had made his own pilgrimage in the 1180s; borrowing his pages was normal practice for travel books of the time, but it leaves readers unsure which scenes Ibn Battuta saw for himself.

The first English translation of Ibn Battuta's travels, in 1829, drew on manuscripts left to which university?

Cambridge was left them by Johann Burckhardt, the Swiss explorer who rediscovered Petra and had studied Arabic there; its professor Samuel Lee then translated the abridged text.

Which Gulf city has a shopping mall named for Ibn Battuta, with courts themed on lands he visited?

Dubai's Ibn Battuta Mall leads shoppers through courts styled after lands he crossed, from Andalusia to China, so an afternoon's stroll covers ground that took him nearly thirty years.

Which city did Ibn Battuta, touring Muslim Spain in 1350, call the bride of Andalusia's cities?

Granada's sultan was too ill to receive him, so the ruler's mother sent a purse of coins in his place; among its lodges he met Persian dervishes who had settled there because it reminded them of home.

In Constantinople, an aged monk clasped Ibn Battuta's hand because it had 'entered' which holy city?

Jerusalem: the monk, whom Ibn Battuta took for the emperor's father, touched the visitor's feet and passed the hand over his own face, then questioned him at length about the city and its Christians.

Ibn Battuta's account of Mali's court contains one of the earliest written descriptions of which instrument?

The Mande xylophone, or bala, was played by the court interpreter, who beat its reed keys and gourd resonators while singing the sultan's praises, his own wives and concubines joining in.

Passing back through Syria in 1348, Ibn Battuta learned that which relative had died fifteen years earlier?

His father had died while he was far from home, and a son he had never met was dead too; he pressed on for home, only to find that his mother had died a few months before he arrived.

Which former Moroccan capital did Ibn Battuta find half deserted after the court had moved to Fez?

Marrakesh was still, he wrote, one of the most beautiful of cities, but when he climbed the tall minaret of its great mosque he looked out over a town largely in ruins.

Sailing home from Tunis in 1349, Ibn Battuta's ship put in at which Mediterranean island?

Sardinia belonged to the Christians, and rumours that the islanders meant to seize the ship once it sailed frightened him so much that he vowed to fast for two months if he got away.

Ibn Battuta is a playable leader in which strategy video game released in 2025?

Civilization VII gives him an ability named after his own book, The Marvels of Traveling, which lets every unit see farther across the map, a fitting gift from a man who kept going to see what came next.

In Najaf, Ibn Battuta visited the mausoleum of which caliph?

Ali's shrine, he was told, cured dozens of cripples laid on the tomb one night each year; he passed the story on but admitted he had never seen it, then left the Baghdad caravan for a long detour through Persia.

Ibn Battuta is thought to have died around 1368, as which Chinese dynasty fell?

The Yuan, China's Mongol rulers, fell to the Ming in 1368; of the old traveller's own last years almost nothing is known beyond a judge's post somewhere in Morocco.