Universal Encyclopedia
Who was Ibn Battuta?
Ibn Battuta (1304–1368/69) was the Moroccan traveler whose thirty years of journeys — some 120,000 kilometers from West Africa to China — make him the most traveled individual of the pre-modern world, outpacing even Marco Polo, and whose dictated memoir is the richest eyewitness account of the 14th-century Muslim world.
Last updated: October 2026
His dictated memoir, the Rihla (“Travels”), is the single richest eyewitness source on the 14th-century Muslim world: its courts, its trade routes, its plagues and its peoples. He served as a judge in Delhi and an ambassador for sultans, and retired to write it all down in Fez.