Ibn Battuta Facts
Ibn Battuta Facts
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| Interesting Ibn Battuta Facts: |
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| All of Battuta's early life we learned from information he included in his travel documentaries. |
| He was born in Tangier into a family of Islamic legal scholars. |
| He studied at a Sunni Maliki school. |
| In June 1324 he embarked on a Hajj, or pilgrimage to Mecca that was to take 16 months. |
| He traveled along the North Africa coast and stopped at various points along the route. |
| Although he set out alone he joined a caravan for safety whenever he could and traveled with them. |
| In the spring of 1326 after a journey of over 2000 miles he arrived in Alexandria where he spent several weeks. |
| He traveled inland to Cairo and by way of Hebron, Jerusalem and Bethlehem to Damascus. |
| He remained in Damascus for the month of Ramadan and then traveled to Medina to the tomb of Mohammad and when he completed his pilgrimage to Mecca he took the title El-Hajji. |
| By 1331 Battuta was in Mogadishu in Somalia and wrote that it "is an exceedingly large city." |
| He continued his travels by ship to the Swahili Coast and the island town of Mombasa and by 1345 he had arrived in Quanzhou, China where he was welcomed into the Muslim quarter by the local Muslim merchants |
| In 1346 he began his journey back to Mecca and chronicled the spread of the Black Death through the Middle East. |
| He arrived back home to Morocco in 1354 and dictated his memoirs, "A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling," which is the only account of his travels. |
| Clearly passages in the manuscript are copied from works by other travelers, and scholars doubt Battuta's assertion that he visited Russia and China, but the manuscript provides an important account of the cultural history of the 14th Century Middle East. |
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