What Ibn Battuta Really Saw in 1341 | History for Sleep

Original author：Sam Refay Calm Nights

Original source：https://www.youtube.com/embed/E_Gjt3xiLfQ

What did Ibn Battuta actually see on the road from India to China in the 1340s? This documentary sets aside the familiar label, the greatest traveller of the medieval world, and stays with one stretch of his life: the years between the court of Delhi and the harbours of southern China. It is not the story of a man collecting countries. It is the story of an ambassador who was handed a royal gift for the emperor of China, watched it disappear in a single night on the Indian coast, and decided that going east with nothing was safer than going back. By 1341 he had spent seven years in the service of Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq of Delhi, a ruler remembered for extremes of generosity and violence, and he had come close to execution himself. The embassy that finally got him out of that court ended in a storm at Calicut. What followed was not a journey home but a chain of islands, coasts and kingdoms: a coral archipelago that paid its bills in sea shells, a mountain climbed on fixed iron chains, a month on a Bengal river to reach an ascetic in the hills, a sultan on Sumatra who gave him a ship, and a Chinese port so crowded with ocean going junks that he stopped trying to count the smaller craft. In this video: Ibn Battuta and his seven years at the Delhi sultanate Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, the emptied capital and the failed token coinage Why a foreign legal scholar could be rich one season and penniless the next The embassy of 1341 and the return gift meant for the Yuan emperor The storm at Calicut and the ship that sailed off with everything he owned Chinese junks as he described them: bamboo sails, soldiers aboard, gardens on deck The Maldives, cowrie shell money and a sultana on the throne His time as a judge in the islands, and the rulings the islanders simply ignored Sri Lanka, the pearl fisheries and the pilgrim climb to Adam's Peak Bengal, the astonishing price of rice, and the holy man in the hills Samudra on Sumatra and the strait that controlled Asian sea trade Tawalisi and the warrior princess Urduja, a country no one has ever located Quanzhou, the registers kept on foreigners, and the portraits drawn of every arrival A banquet in Hangzhou and the famous rope trick The journey north to the imperial capital, and why historians doubt it Ibn Juzayy, and how the Rihla was dictated years after the travelling ended This documentary is made for education and historical interest. It follows a fourteenth century world in which the Indian Ocean was already a crowded, connected highway, long before European ships arrived, seen through the eyes of a man who was neither neutral nor modern: a conservative jurist with firm opinions, an unusual eye for small detail, and a habit of writing down his own defeats. The goal is to let his account speak at its real size, without inflating it into legend or waving it away as invention. Disclaimer: The narration draws on Ibn Battuta's own account, the Rihla, as set down with the scholar Ibn Juzayy in the 1350s, together with modern scholarship. The book was composed years after the events and its dates are often unreliable, so the narration separates what other sources confirm, what rests on his word alone, and what is disputed. The strongest doubts concern the journey north to the imperial capital of China, where his report of the emperor's death does not match Chinese records; a smaller group of scholars question more of the Chinese material. Where the evidence cannot settle a question, the narration leaves it open. Sources and further reading: The Travels of Ibn Battuta, A.D. 1325 to 1354, translated by H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham, Hakluyt Society Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century The Travels of Ibn Battutah, edited by Tim Mackintosh-Smith Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250 to 1350 Peter Jackson, The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History UC Berkeley ORIAS, The Travels of Ibn Battuta: A Virtual Tour Encyclopaedia Britannica entries on Ibn Battuta, Muhammad ibn Tughluq and Quanzhou Ibn Battuta, Ibn Battuta travels, what Ibn Battuta saw, Rihla, Ibn Juzayy, Muhammad bin Tughluq, Delhi Sultanate, medieval India, Calicut, Chinese junk, Maldives history, cowrie shells, Adam's Peak, Sri Lanka history, Bengal history, Sumatra, Samudra Pasai, Tawalisi, Urduja, Quanzhou, Zaytun, Hangzhou, Yuan dynasty, Indian Ocean trade, medieval travel, Silk Road of the sea, Islamic history, medieval history documentary, world history documentary, historical mystery, history for sleep For more slow, detailed history built on first hand accounts and on the questions those accounts cannot quite answer, subscribe and come back for the next long journey.