Ibn Battuta went further north into Assam, then turned around and continued with his original plan.

The Mamluks however, continued to use the services of the remaining Assassins: Ibn Battuta reported in the 14th century their fixed rate of pay per murder.

The Mamluks continued to use the services of the remaining Assassins: Ibn Battuta reported in the 14th century their fixed rate of pay per murder.

For safety, Ibn Battuta usually joined a caravan to reduce the risk of an attack by wandering Arab Bedouin.

Ibn Battuta joined the royal caravan for a while, then turned north on the Silk Road to Tabriz, the first major city in the region to open its gates to the Mongols and by then an important trading centre as most of its nearby rivals had been razed by the Mongol invaders.

On the strength of his years of study in Mecca, Ibn Battuta was appointed a qadi, or judge, by the sultan.

The Sultan was erratic even by the standards of the time and for six years Ibn Battuta veered between living the high life of a trusted subordinate and falling under suspicion of treason for a variety of offences.

En route to the coast at the start of his journey to China, Ibn Battuta and his party were attacked by a group of bandits.

On boarding a Chinese junk heading for Southeast Asia, Ibn Battuta was unfairly charged a hefty sum by the crew and lost much of what he had collected during his stay in China.

Ibn Battuta also reported " the rampart of Yajuj and Majuj " was " sixty days ' travel " from the city of Zeitun ( Quanzhou ); Hamilton Alexander Rosskeen Gibb notes that Ibn Battuta believed that Great Wall of China was built by Dhul-Qarnayn to contain Gog and Magog as mentioned in the Quran.

Taghaza was a commercial centre and awash with Malian gold, though Ibn Battuta did not form a favourable impression of the place, recording that it was plagued by flies and the water was brackish.

There Ibn Battuta was acquainted by a local Malian merchant named Abu Bakr Ibn Yaqub, together they ventured around Timbuktu and sailed to Gao, it was during their travels that Ibn Battuta first encountered a hippopotamus, which was feared among the local boatmen because it drowned or killed local inhabitants.

However Ibn Battuta also mentioned an ingenious trick used by locals that allowed them to hunt hippopotamus for both their meat and hides.

Ibn Battuta is known to have sailed by boat to Gao where he spent a month learning about its inhabitants and geography.

Ibn Battuta in Egypt, a 19th-century lithograph by Léon Benett

Western Orientalists do not believe that Ibn Battuta visited all the places he described and argue that in order to provide a comprehensive description of places in the Muslim world, he relied on hearsay evidence and made use of accounts by earlier travellers.

Ancient Romans such as Pliny ( N. H. 5. 10 ) thought that the river near Timbuktu was part of the Nile River, a belief also held by Ibn Battuta, while early European explorers thought that it flowed west and joined the Senegal River.

In the 14th-century Arabian Sea, the traveller Ibn Battuta provided the earliest known description of pearl diving by means of attaching a cord to the diver's waist.

This is corroborated by ibn Battuta himself who recalls several hundred Malian ships off the coast.

:* 1300-1400 AD: Mogadishu and other prosperous Somali city-states are visited by Ibn Battuta and Zheng He.

But even in the 14th century, the North African traveller Ibn Battuta visiting Qatif around 1331, found it inhabited by Arabs whom he described as " extremist Shi ' is " ( rafidiyya ghulat ), which Cole presumes is how a 14th century Sunni would describe Ismailis.

Cloves were traded by Muslim sailors and merchants during the Middle Ages in the profitable Indian Ocean trade, the Clove trade is also mentioned by Ibn Battuta and even famous One Thousand and One Nights characters such Sinbad the Sailor is known to have bought and sold Cloves.

The Sahara was traversed by mostly Muslim traders, natives and pilgrims, of which the best known is Ibn Battuta.

From Aden, Ibn Battuta embarked on a ship heading for Zeila on the coast of Somalia.

He also described traveling further north, through the Grand Canal to Beijing, but as he neared the capital an internal power struggle among the Yuan Mongols erupted, causing Ibn Battuta and his Hui guides to return to the south coast.

The mare to the south and west of Ibn Battuta contains a number of ghost crater formations, consisting of crater rims that have been submerged by lava flows and now form ring-shaped projections in the surface.

Cadamosto's accounts are also invaluable for historians of Africa, providing the first written detailed accounts of the Senegambia region, beyond the fringes touched one century earlier by Arab historian Ibn Battuta.

But there are also travel reports, such as that of Ibn Battuta, and early Portuguese accounts that claimed Patani had an established Muslim community even prior to Melaka ( which officially converted in 1413 ), which would suggest that non-courtiers, probably merchants who made contact with other emerging Muslims centers of the time, were the first to convert to the region.

The Arab traveller Ibn Battuta who was in the region in the 14th century was impressed by the class of Muslim traders that had emerged in Aksaray and noted the urban centre as a beautiful city, surrounded by waterways and gardens, with a water supply coming right to the houses of the city.

The 14th century narrative of Ibn Battuta refers to the ruler of this region as residing at a city called Balia Patanam.

In the early spring of 1326, after a journey of over, Ibn Battuta arrived at the port of Alexandria, then part of the Bahri Mamluk empire.

Of the three usual routes to Mecca, Ibn Battuta chose the least-travelled, which involved a journey up the Nile valley, then east to the Red Sea port of Aydhab, Upon approaching the town however, a local rebellion forced him to turn back.

With a change in the monsoon winds, Ibn Battuta sailed back to Arabia, first to Oman and the Strait of Hormuz then on to Mecca for the hajj of 1330 ( or 1332 ).

After a month in the city, Ibn Battuta returned to Astrakhan, then arrived in the capital city Sarai al-Jadid and reported his travelling account to Sultan Mohammad Uzbek.

The madh ' hab he observed was Imam Al-Shafi ‘ i, with similar customs as he had seen in coastal India especially among the Mappila Muslim, who were also the followers of Imam Al-Shafi ‘ i. Ibn Battuta then sailed to Malacca, Vietnam, the Philippines and finally Quanzhou in Fujian province, China.

Although Ibn Battuta never mentioned this visit specifically, when he heard the story it may have planted a seed in his mind as he then decided to cross the Sahara and visit the Muslim kingdoms on its far side.

It is related that Prophet Solomon climbed this mountain and looked out over the land of South Asia, which was then covered with darkness, but he turned back without descending into this new frontier, and left only the mountain which is named after him ( from Ibn Battuta ).

According to Ibn Battuta, it would appear that the district was then in a very disturbed state since the escort of the Emperor's embassy had to assist in relieving Jalali from an attacking body of Hindus and lost one of their officers in the fight.

Among the famous people who have visited his shrine over the centuries are the famous scholar-explorer Ibn Battuta, who visited in 1334, and the Founder of Sikhism, Guru Nanak Dev, who met the then head of the shrine, Sheikh Ibrāhīm, twice, and his meeting led to the incorporation of 112 couplets ( saloks ) and four hymns by Bābā Farid, in the Sikh Holy Book, the Guru Granth Sahib, by the fifth Guru, Arjan Dev in 1604.

(, ), or simply Ibn Battuta (), also known as Shams ad-Din ( February 25, 1304 – 1368 or 1369 ), was a Berber Muslim Moroccan explorer, known for his extensive travels, accounts of which were published in the Rihla ( lit.

Ibn Battuta arrived in the Chinese port city of Quanzhou, also known as Zaytun ).

What is known about the kings of the Malian Empire is taken from the writings of Arab scholars, including Al-Umari, Abu-sa ' id Uthman ad-Dukkali, Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Battuta.

Detailed descriptions of Chinese junks during the Middle Ages are known from various travellers to China, such as Ibn Battuta of Tangier, Morocco and Marco Polo of Venice, Italy.

The ngoni is known to have existed since 1352, when Ibn Battuta, a Moroccan traveller reported seeing one in the court of Mansa Musa.

He is also known as the writer who dictated the travels of Ibn Battuta.

Jebel Musa, named, according to the 14th-century Berber Muslim geographer Ibn Battuta, to honour Musa bin Nusayr, to whom the conqueror of Andalusia Tariq ibn Ziyad owed fealty, was known to the ancient Greeks as Mount Abyla or to Romans as Columna.

What is known about the kings of the Malian Empire is taken from the writings of Arab scholars, including Al-Umari, Abu-sa ' id Uthman ad-Dukkali, Ibn Khaldun, and Ibn Battuta.