This map, created by Heather Jones, was published in summer 2011 as part of a special feature in the magazine. Time about Islam. It shows all the journeys made by Ibn Battuta throughout his life.
Ibn Battuta was a traveller and explorer born in Tangier in 1304. When he was 21, he embarked on a journey that took him some 120,000 kilometres, covering the entire Islamic world and beyond. In 1354, he returned to Fez and spent the rest of his life there, where he recounted his journey to Ibn Yuzayy, who wrote it down. Almost everything we know about his travels comes from this work.
Heather Jones, on this map, shows in red the route travelled by Ibn Battuta, indicating with numbers some of the most important places on his journeys:
- Tangier, his city of birth and starting point.
- Mecca, the destination of his first journey, where he arrived in 1326.
- Constantinople, where he was amazed by the large number of temples of different religions.
- Delhi, a city he arrived in 1334 and where he spent eight years working as a judge.
- Maldives, where he spent nine months with four women.
- Ceylon, an island he travelled to in order to visit Adam's Peak.
- China, where his account is somewhat vague, although he did mention his surprising wealth.
- Aleppo, the city where he learned of the ravages of the Black Death.
- Fez, where he ended his journey and lived until his death, sometime between 1368 and 1377.
On the map, Heather Jones also depicts Marco Polo's journey, the great European traveller, in blue, and Zheng He's voyages, the great Chinese explorer, in yellow, to highlight the extraordinary nature of Ibn Battuta's journey compared to his contemporaries.
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