Ibn Battuta in China: Culture Shock, Plague, and the 14th Century World

1346, Quanzhou, China. Ibn Battuta found China a land of wonders an upside-down place where people used paper instead of coin

and even beggars wore silk. "China was beautiful," he wrote, "But it did not please me." Because while Ibn Battuta had traveled widely,

most of the communities he visited were Muslim or Muslim-ruled. And he rarely ventured outside that bubble. Where minority religions existed, they were at least other

monotheists, like Christians or Jews. The Chinese, by contrast, were polytheistic and worshipped what Ibn Battuta considered idols.

Confucian scholars were dismissive of Islam, and the population ate pork and cremated their dead. "This disturbed me so much," he wrote, "that I stayed indoors

most of the time, and only went out when necessary. During my stay in China, whenever I saw Muslims, I always felt as though I were meeting my own family

and close kinsmen." Perhaps it was time to go home. But when he did so, death followed.

Ibn Battuta didn't have to look far to find other Muslims in Yuan China. Indeed, for over a century, the Mongol Yuan had kept an open door policy

that invited foreigners to settle and form trading villages. While in these Islamic enclaves, he even ran into other scholars he'd met during his travels. Because

as you've probably understood by now, Ibn Battuta was not an explorer. During his travels, he'd made his way along well-known pilgrimage

and trade routes. The Mongol conquest and the peace and security they created had fostered an unprecedented network of maritime and overland trade routes.

Few people traveled to the extent that Ibn Battuta did, but he was far from the only person to journey from Africa to East Asia. In China he met Syrians, Egyptians, and even a man who grew up

40 miles from him, back in Morocco. Because you see, the world of the mid 14th century was an interconnected world. One where goods and people could go from one side of Africa

and Eurasia to the other. And that would ultimately destroy this period of peace and interchange. Because in central Asia, a terrible disease was emerging.

A disease that caused painful buboes on the body, extreme headaches, and delirium. An even more aggressive form, the airborne pneumatic variety, caused victims to cough blood

and killed within hours. It was a disease borne by flease. Fleas that lived on rats, an animal that liked to infest ships

or stow away on caravans and wagons. In other words, an insect that infested all modes of transport Ibn Battuta had taken on his long road. When he

boarded his ship back to India, he had no idea that he was seeing the last days of Yuan China. Bubonic Plague would lead to the dynasty's collapse and sow chaos

on the peaceful trade routes of the four Mongol kingdoms. Indeed, Ibn Battuta would begin to see that collapse himself. He retraced his route to India,

and considered going back to Delhi, but word reached him that the sultanate was tearing itself apart. And Ibn Battuta was worried that the sultan would execute him

for his failed mission. So, he made another plan. A little... ah, you know, what is that thing called? Oh yeah! A side trip. To Mecca,

to make the Hajj one last time. But by the time he made it to the Arabian Peninsula, the pilgrimage season had ended. He would need to wait a year before it started again.

So, rather than just hang out, he took another separate side trip, a side-side-trip, visiting Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt

to see how things had changed in the time he'd been away. And he was shocked at what he found. The great Il Khan, the man he'd traveled with, was dead, likely from plague.

He'd left an empty throne, several ongoing wars, and his Mongol and Turkish generals were ripping the land apart in a series of succession conflicts.

It was the first dark cloud in what would be a storm of sadness. He arrived in Damascus to find that the son he'd left behind

with one of his many ex-wives had died in childhood, and a separate message told him that his father had passed away 15 years before. Saddened,

he took a trip to Aleppo. But as he traveled, a great curtain was being pulled across Syria. The Black Plague descended on the Middle East, chasing him on the road.

He fled back to Damascus, but found the oasis city ground to a halt, with two thousand dying every day and the populace in terror. As in Europe,

the Islamic world believed the disease came from a religious, rather than medical, source. But all Christian Europe interpreted it as punishment for human sin, and greeted

the plague with apocalyptic sermons, self-flagellation, and massacres of their Jewish neighbors. Islamic cities looked on it as a manifestation of the

divine will. To them, it was an aspect of God's unknowable plan that must simply be endured with humility. Ibn Battuta saw the

residents of Damascus fast for three days, followed by a packed day of prayer and supplication at the mosque. Afterward, the multi-ethnic populace parade through the city streets

together, holding aloft copies of their holy texts. Muslims carried the Quran, Christians the Bible, and Jews the Torah, all with tears, imploring their god

to stop the suffering. Damascus would lose more than 30,000 citizens to the disease. Its streets choked with funeral parades, corpses left uncovered

due to the city running out of burial shrouds. Ibn Battuta fled to Cario, passing empty villages and bodies along the road. And when he arrived, he found the great city

with a population of half a million deserted by its leaders and losing 24,000 residents each day. Plague would eventually kill 200,000,

including most of the army officers, sending the Mamluk sultanate into decline. But in 1348, the worst year of the plague,

Ibn Battuta made it to Mecca and fulfilled his goal of making the Hajj one last time. It must have made him think of his first pilgrimage, when he left Tangier

at the age of 21, freshly graduated and never having left home. Now he was a 45-year-old man. "I was moved by memories of my homeland,"

he wrote, "affection for my family and dear friends who drew me toward my land, which in my opinion was better than any other country." Yet when he arrived home

in Tangier, he found his mother had died of plague as well. And days later, he was on the road again. At a loss for what to do, he volunteered as a soldier to defend

the Rock of Gibraltar from a Spanish siege, but arrived to find the battle already over. Instead he toured Muslim Spain before returning home. But that

was not the end of his journey. The Sultan of Morocco, hearing of his voyages, appointed him ambassador to the golden empire of Mali. Though that's

a tale you'll have to hear about over in our Empire of Mali series, because this dude went everywhere. And when he returned, the sultan gave Ibn Battuta a new

command: to dictate his story to the poet Ibn Juzayy. There could be a record of all he saw in the Muslim world. The result was not a perfect book.

Ibn Battuta worked from memory, and as a result got details wrong, misremembered dates, and mixed up some events. So,

either Ibn Battuta himself or Ibn Juzayy decided to fill in the blanks by copying sections of other travel books, even inventing some journeys so the book would be a full compendium

of the whole Muslim world. For instance, Ibn Battuta likely never made it out of southern China, nor did he travel far north into Russia as the book claims. And Rob

will talk about how we know that in our lies episode. But despite all these issues, the travels is an extraordinary document, one that,

despite its contradictions, exaggerations, and ocassionally confused timelines, gives historians an unprecedented look at the Muslim world of the 14th century

and how its trade networks operated. Given that, it's almost anti-climactic to say that when they were originally published, they received little attention.

In fact, Ibn Battuta's fellow judges often called him an uneducated liar. We know almost nothing about the rest of his life, only that he likely settled down as a mid-level

qadi, probably married again, if precedent had anything to say about it, and died without fanfare. It's ironic then, that today Ibn Battuta's personal fame

eclipses any of the rulers and even some of the kingdoms he visited. While few people around the world have heard of the Il Khanate or Mohammed Tublo, Ibn Battuta's life

has been the subject of television dramas, movies, and even video games. You can visit Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai where the different sections are themed to his

journeys. Fly into Tangier and you'll land in Ibn Battuta airport, eat at Ibn Battuta restaurants, visit an Ibn Battuta festival, and even see

an unmarked tomb that's said to be his final resting place. He even has a crater on the Moon. "I have indeed, praise be to God, attained

my desire in this world," he wrote, "which was to travel through the earth. And I have attained in this respect what no other person has attained to my knowledge."

Happy travels, friends. See ya next time. Legendary thanks to Ahmed Ziad Turk, Casey Muscha, Dominic Valenciana, Gunnar Clovis, Kyle Murgatroyd, and Orels1.