The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  16. My translation. D&S, vol. 4, pp. 103–4.

  17. IB says that his second departure from Calicut took place “at the end of the season for traveling on the sea,” meaning the weeks before the southwest monsoon came up in full force. Although the Malabar ports did not close down altogether until June, IB almost certainly left Calicut no later than about 1 April, since vessels bound for Arabia or the Persian Gulf had to reach their destinations before the monsoon reached full strength in those latitudes. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 375. Therefore, the sinking of IB’s junk off Calicut must have taken place no later than about 1 March to make room for his trip to Quilon and back, which probably consumed at least 25 days. (He says it took him ten days to travel from Calicut to Quilon.)

  18. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 64–66) identifies Sandapur with Goa. Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 170–72. IB presents the only account of Jamal al-Din’s conquest of the city and its subsequent recovery by the raja.

  19. IB states that the ships left Honavar on Saturday and attacked Sandapur on the following Monday, or 13 Jumada 1743 A.H. (14 October 1342).

  20. IB declares that he stayed in Sandapur from 13 Jumada I until the middle part of Sha’ban, that is, about three months. 15 Sha’ban 743 corresponds to 13 January 1343. In connection with his first visit to Honavar, IB mentions that at some subsequent time he stayed with Jamal al-Din for eleven months (D&S, vol. 4, p. 70), but a sojourn of this length fits badly with the other meager chronological information IB provides concerning his India travels.

  21. He says he arrived there in late Muharram, which is the first month of the Muslim year; 28 Muharram, that is, one of the last days of the month, calculates as 22 June 1343.

  22. IB’s date for his flight from Sandapur when it was under seige is 2 Rabi’ II. That date in 744 A.H. corresponds to 24 August 1343. In his initial description of the west coast in the Rihla, he implies that at some point he traveled along the road that paralleled the Kanara and Malabar coasts. This may have been the time, since escape from Sandapur by sea would likely have been more difficult than by land.

  23. IB says that he left Sandapur on 2 Rabi’ II, and he implies that he arrived in the Maldives shortly before the following Ramadan. The intervening time was four to five months, presumably divided between his journey from Sandapur to Calicut, his stay in the latter place, and his ten-day sea voyage (as he recalls it) to the Maldives.

  24. Clarence Maloney collected a version of the legend, very similar to IB’s story, in the mid-1970s. People of the Maldives (Madras, 1980), pp. 98–99.

  25. S. D. Goitein, “From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India Traders of the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 23 (1980): 43–66; “Letters and Documents on the India Trade in Medieval Times,” Islamic Culture 37 (1963): 188–205; “From the Mediterranean to India: Documents on the Trade to India, South Arabia and East Africa from the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Speculum 29 (1954): 181–97.

  26. IB’s Kannalus may be identified with Kinalos Island. The Voyage of François Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed. Albert Gray, 2 vols. (London, n.d.; reprint edn., New York, 1963?), vol. 2, p. 438. François Pyrard was a French sailor who spent five and a half years in the Maldives in the early seventeenth century and subsequently wrote a lively and detailed description of the customs and manners of their inhabitants. The edition cited here also includes edited translations of earlier reports on the Maldives, including IB’s narrative.

  27. Maloney, People of the Maldives, pp. 219, 233.

  28. IB implies that he reached the islands some weeks before Ramadan 744. That month began on 17 January 1344 (see note 23).

  29. IB and subsequent travelers to the islands speak of the “Maldivian fever,” which was almost certainly malaria. Maloney, People of the Maldives, p. 398. If IB became infected with malaria, he would probably have been seriously ill for a few weeks.

  30. He dates his first marriage in the Maldives to the month of Shawwal, which began on 16 February 1344.

  31. Maloney, People of the Maldives, pp. 191–96.

  32. Mahdi Husain’s translation reads “so as to bring back the Maldive islands under his sway” (MH, p. 214). “Bring back” is an accurate translation of the verbal noun tarajju’i, but the islands had not previously been invaded or ruled by the Sultanate of Ma’bar. See D&S, vol. 4, p. 160.

  33. In the seventeenth century the King of Bengal would send a fleet of galleys to raid and sack the Maldives. Gray, François Pyrard, vol. 1, pp. 310–20.

  34. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 465.

  35. Pyrard also remarks on the high frequency of marriage and divorce in the islands. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 150–55.

  36. IB gives the date of his departure from the islands as mid Rabi’ II 745 A.H.; 15 Rabi’ II calculates as 26 August 1344. That would have been the late summer monsoon period and a plausible time to be sailing northeastward from the Maldives. Here my revised chronology, placing his departure from Delhi in 742 rather than 743, falls back into line with IB’s own dating. His departure from the Maldives in 745 accords well with the dating of the subsequent visit to Ma’bar (see note 4). IB mentions that he lived in the Maldives for a year and a half (D&S, vol. 4, p. 114), but this statement does not seem compatible with the other chronological data he provides. A stay of about eight months, from mid Sha’ban 744 to mid Rabi’ II 745, makes more sense.

  11 China

  I assure you that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom, Zaiton is visited by a hundred . . . I can tell you further that the revenue accruing to the Great Khan from this city and port is something colossal.1

  Marco Polo

  Ibn Battuta visited Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on his way to Ma’bar so that he might go on pilgrimage to the top of Adam’s Peak, the spectacular conical mountain that loomed over the southwestern interior of the island. “That exceeding high mountain hath a pinnacle of surpassing height, which, on account of the clouds, can rarely be seen,” wrote John de Marignolli, the Christian monk who passed through Ceylon just a few years after Ibn Battuta. “But God, pitying our tears, lighted it up one morning just before the sun rose, so that we beheld it glowing with the brightest flame”2 Ibn Battuta recalls that he first saw the peak from far out to sea, “rising up into the sky like a column of smoke.” The mountain was sacred to Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists alike, and pilgrims of all three faiths climbed together to the summit to behold a depression in the surface of the rock vaguely resembling the shape of an enormous foot. For Buddhists it is the footprint of Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. For Hindus it is a trace of the Great God Shiva, and for some Christians it belongs to St. Thomas. In Muslim tradition God cast Adam and Eve from the seventh heaven in disgrace, and when they tumbled to earth the man landed hard on the peak of the mountain, leaving an impress of his foot in the solid rock. He remained there for a thousand years atoning for his sins, until the Archangel Gabriel led him to Arabia, where Eve had fallen. The man and the woman met on the plain of ’Arafat and later returned to Ceylon to propagate the human race. Adam was not only the first man but the first prophet of Islam as well, and it was to reverence him that Muslim pilgrims trekked to the Foot, as they still do today.

  Arriving from the Maldives in the company of Captain Ibrahim, Ibn Battuta put ashore at a place he calls Battala, probably modern Puttalam on the west central coast.3 In the pattern of Muslim maritime settlement, Ceylon’s western coast was an extension of Malabar. Merchants of the Arabian Sea had operated from ports like Puttalam since Abbasid times, exporting rubies, pearls, areca nuts, and from about the fourteenth century large quantities of cinnamon. Puttalam lay within the domain of the Hindu kingdom of Jaffna, which at that time dominated the northern half of the island, prospering from the Indo–Ceylonese trade and the wealth of the pearl fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar.

  Ibn Battuta arrived in Puttalam to find the
King of Jaffna, the Arya Chakravarti, temporarily in residence. Announcing himself a kinsman by marriage of the Sultan of Ma’bar (with whom Jaffna had good relations), he had no trouble getting himself introduced into the royal court. Since the Arya Chakravarti understood some Persian, Ibn Battuta regaled him for three days with stories of “kings and countries,” then politely requested patronage to secure guides and provisions for the long walk to Adam’s Peak. The king not only gave him all the supplies he needed but also a palanquin for his personal comfort plus the fellowship of 10 Brahmin priests, 15 porters, 10 courtiers of the royal household, and 4 yogis. At this point Ibn Battuta’s personal suite appears to have consisted of al-Tuzari, a second Egyptian gentleman, and two slave girls.

  The party made the round trip up the mountain and back to Puttalam by a circular route through the southwestern quarter of the island, a journey facilitated by Ceylon’s superior network of high roads, stone bridges, and rest houses.4 They first traveled due south along the palm-lined coast to the port of Chilaw (Bandar Salawat). There they turned southeastward into the interior, passed briefly through the territory of the Buddhist Sinhalese kingdom of Gampola, then climbed gradually upwards through the lush montane forests of the central highlands.5 There were two tracks to the summit of the mountain, but custom instructed that a pilgrim would acquire divine merit only if he ascended by the more difficult route and came down by the easy one. The final ascent up the rocky cone was itself an act of religious faith, for the pilgrim had to haul himself grunting and sweating up a series of nearly vertical cliffs by means of little stirrups affixed to chains suspended from iron pegs.

  Making it to the top in one piece, Ibn Battuta and his comrades camped for three days at a cave near the summit. Following tradition, he walked each morning and evening to the site of the Foot and joined the cluster of Hindus, Buddhists, and fellow Muslims, each group possessing its own notion of what holy event the imprint represented but sharing nonetheless a rare moment of transcendent brotherhood. He also beheld one of the most breathtaking scenic views anywhere in the world, a panorama of wooded hills rippling away from the base of the Peak to the golden band of the sea in the far distance.

  Adam’s Peak, Ceylon

  Sally and Richard Greenhill

  The party returned to the coast by a roundabout route southward to the port of Dondra (Dinawar), then up along the western shore. When they reached Puttalam again, Ibn Battuta found the faithful Captain Ibrahim waiting to ferry him and his companions across the Gulf of Mannar to the shore of the subcontinent and the kingdom of Ma’bar. The stages of the trip to Adam’s Peak and back suggest that he may have put out from Puttalam in October.6

  This was the transitional period between the two monsoons, a season when heavy squalls might come up in the gulf without warning. More than that, Ibn Battuta mentions twice in the Rihla that despite his long acquaintanceship with Ibrahim, he never really had much confidence in him as a sailor. Setting a course northeastward from Puttalam, the vessel had almost made it to the South Indian coast, when suddenly

  the wind became violent and the water rose so high that it was about to enter the ship, while we had no able captain with us. We then got near a rock, where the ship was on the point of being wrecked; afterwards we came into shallow water wherein the ship began to sink. Death stared us in the face and the passengers jettisoned all that they possessed and bade adieu to one another.

  Racing against the wind and waves, the crew managed to cut down the main mast and throw it overboard, then lash together a crude raft and lower it to the sea. Ibn Battuta got his two companions and his concubines down onto it, but there was no room left for him. Too poor a swimmer to jump into the water and hang onto the raft with a rope, he could only stick with the ship and hope for the best. The sailors who stayed behind tried vainly to tie together more floats, but darkness fell and the work had to be given up. Throughout the night Ibn Battuta huddled terrified in the stern as the water rose around him. In the meantime his companions made it safely to shore and sought help from Tamil villagers, for in the morning a rescue party of boatmen suddenly appeared alongside the rapidly sinking dhow. The crew and remaining passengers were all taken to shore, apparently including Captain Ibrahim, though of him we hear no more.

  Reunited with his friends and slave women on a rural stretch of the southeastern coast, Ibn Battuta gladly accepted food and shelter from the Tamil country folk who had plucked him from the sea. He seems to have saved some of his personal belongings from the shipwreck, including mementos from various Sufi divines and a bag of pearls, rubies, and other gems given to him by the King of Jaffna. The party remained with the local Tamils while word was sent to Ghiyath al-Din, the Sultan of Ma’bar, that a brother-in-law of his, late of Delhi, had arrived on the coast in distressing circumstances. The sultan happened to be on a military tour not far away, and in three days’ time a company of horse and infantry arrived to conduct the visitors across the dry coastal lowlands to the royal camp.

  Ibn Battuta spent altogether about two months in Ma’bar, but it was not a period of his travels he recalls with any joy. More than a decade had passed since Jalal al-Din Ahsan Shah, the father of Ibn Battuta’s ex-wife, Hurnasab, had revolted against Muhammad Tughluq and founded an independent Muslim state held precariously together by a small, turbulent minority of Turko–Afghan fighting men. Jalal al-Din had died in 1338 or 1339 while Ibn Battuta was still in Delhi. His successor ruled less than two years before taking a Hindu arrow in the head. The third sultan was assassinated by his own commanders after only a few months in power. The fourth was Ghiyath al-Din. A former cavalryman under Muhammad Tughluq and husband of Hurnasab’s sister, he had fought his way to the throne in 1340 or 1341.

  Since the entire Muslim population of Ma’bar was small, limited to the military aristocracy, coastal merchants, and a modest bureaucratic and religious corps, Ghiyath al-Din would likely have welcomed the former qadi of Delhi to his court whether the marriage connection existed or not. Beyond that, Ibn Battuta arrived with a fascinating proposal that Ghiyath al-Din was only too happy to entertain:

  I had an interview with the sultan in the course of which I broached the Maldive affair and proposed that he should send an expedition to those islands. He set about with determination to do so and specified the warships for that purpose.

  The plan the two men devised was to have Ibn Battuta lead a naval invasion of the atolls and intimidate Queen Khadija into accepting an unequal alliance with the sultanate. Ghiyath al-Din would marry one of the queen’s sisters while men loyal to him, Ibn Battuta among them, would run the kingdom as a satellite of Ma’bar. The plot had only to await preparation of an attack fleet, which, the sultan’s naval chief reported, would take at least three months.7

  Presumably the admiral set to work fitting out the warships, but the plan began to go awry almost as soon as it was hatched. From the outset, Ibn Battuta took a dislike to Ghiyath al-Din, whose troops went about the land rounding up Tamil villagers and indiscriminately impaling them on sharpened stakes, the sort of political atrocity absolutely forbidden to Muslim rulers by Qur’anic injunction. Ibn Battuta and his retinue spent some time in Pattan (Fattan), the main port of Ma’bar,8 then traveled upcountry to Madurai, the capital of the sultanate and one of the major towns of southeastern India. There he found the population in the throes of an epidemic so lethal that “whoever caught infection died on the morrow, or the day after, and if not on the third day, then on the fourth.” He purchased a healthy slave girl in the city, but she died the following day. Ghiyath al-Din, who was already ill from taking a love potion containing iron filings, witnessed the loss of his mother and son to the epidemic. A week later he himself died.9 Nasir al-Din, a nephew of the dead sultan and a soldier of apparently low origins, quickly seized the throne and got to the business of dismissing or murdering various political enemies.

  The new ruler was happy enough to retain the services of his predecessor’s brother-in-law and pressed him to carry
on with the expedition. Ibn Battuta might at that point have been willing to move ahead, but he suddenly fell seriously ill himself, probably not with the disease that had killed so many in Madurai but from the malaria he had contracted in the Maldives. By the time he recovered he had lost all interest in the conspiracy, disliked Madurai intensely, and wanted only to get out of Ma’bar. He never explains why he had such a drastic change of heart, but he gives the impression that he had little confidence in Nasir al-Din and liked him even less than Ghiyath al-Din. Whatever the reason, he refused the sultan’s urgings to launch the war fleet and finally got permission to leave Ma’bar with his little entourage. His original plan of travel — before he got involved in Maldivian politics — was to visit Ceylon and Ma’bar, then go directly on to Bengal. But if he was leaving from Pattan about December 1344, he would not have found any vessels sailing into the Bay of Bengal until the start of the summer winds in May.10 Ships were going in the other direction, however — westward around Ceylon to Malabar and Aden. If his immediate object was to flee the Sultanate of Ma’bar as fast as possible, then he and his companions would go wherever the monsoon blew.11 And so he returned once again to Quilon on the Malabar coast.

  His career at sixes and sevens, he stayed in Quilon for three months, still recovering from his illness. Then he decided to try his luck with his old patron Jamal al-Din of Honavar. The sultan might well have been less than delighted to see the man who had abandoned him so abruptly during the siege of Sandapur two and a half years earlier, but in any case the reunion was not to be. Ibn Battuta and his group took passage on a ship bound for Honavar, well enough aware that storms and shallows were not the only perils on the west Indian coast. Marco Polo had passed through the region about a half century earlier and described the danger well: