Ibn Battuta's Travels

1325–1354 CE — Global, The Islamic world

Today: From Morocco to China (born in Tangier)

A young legal scholar left Tangier for the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not come home for twenty-nine years. Ibn Battuta covered perhaps 75,000 miles — West Africa, East Africa, Arabia, Persia, the steppe, India, the Maldives, Sumatra, China — and worked as a judge in several of them, because a shared language of law and faith meant a Moroccan could hold office in Delhi. His account is the best surviving portrait of the 14th-century world from the inside. He complains about the food.

Worth knowing: He served as a judge in the Maldives and in Delhi, for a sultan he describes as generous and homicidal in roughly equal measure. A man from Morocco could be appointed to the bench in India because the qualification — knowing Islamic law — travelled better than any passport.

Pattern: Trade-route shift — The path or medium of exchange moves, and a place or power rises or declines because it sits on or off the new route.

Entry 135 of 240 in Precedent, a walk through the whole human story in order.