Place · port city & home town · Morocco
Tangier
Also known as Tangier, Tanja, Tanger
The Maghribi port Ibn Baṭṭūṭa left in 1325 at twenty-one, intending the hajj, and did not see again for twenty-four years. He travelled perhaps a hundred and twenty thousand kilometres in thirty years, eight of them in India, and dictated the Riḥla after coming home for good.
- Function
- Trade & production
- Confidence
- Established / referenced
- Location
- 35.760, -5.834
Worth knowing
He is buried in the town he left. His account was largely unknown outside the Arab world until a French edition appeared in the 1850s, which is why Marco Polo, who travelled less and wrote less, was the famous one in Europe for five centuries.
Connections (1)
- Traveller routeQuanzhou
Tangier to Quanzhou is the longest single route in this repository, and the thing Ibn Battuta demonstrates is that it could be travelled inside one legal and linguistic world: he found Arabic-speaking qadis, Sufi lodges and Maliki law from the Atlantic to the South China Sea, and was employed as a judge at two points along it. The Rihla is a description of that world's extent.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Tangier”. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Riḥla, trans. H.A.R. Gibb, 4 vols (1958–94); Ross Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (1986).
Open Tangier in the repository →