The Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta, who visited Constantinople towards the end of 1332, mentions in his memoirs having met Andronikos III.

* 1304 – Ibn Battuta, Arabian explorer ( d. c. 1368 )

Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta left vivid descriptions of the empire.

(, ), 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 is considered one of the greatest travellers of all time.

Ibn Battuta was born into a Berber family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, on 25 February 1304, during the reign of the Marinid dynasty.

In June 1325, at the age of twenty-one, Ibn Battuta set off from his hometown on a hajj, or pilgrimage, to Mecca, a journey that would take sixteen months.

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

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.

Ibn Battuta returned to Cairo and took a second side trip, this time to Mamluk-controlled Damascus.

Rather than return home, Ibn Battuta instead decided to continue on, choosing as his next destination the Ilkhanate, a Mongol Khanate, to the northeast.

An interactive display about Ibn Battuta in Ibn Battuta Mall in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

On 17 November 1326, following a month spent in Mecca, Ibn Battuta joined a large caravan of pilgrims returning to Iraq across the Arabian Peninsula.

Then, instead of continuing on to Baghdad with the caravan, Ibn Battuta started a six-month detour that took him into Persia.

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.

Ibn Battuta left again for Baghdad, probably in July, but first took an excursion northwards along the river Tigris, visiting Mosul, Cizre and Mardin, in modern day Iraq and Turkey.

Ibn Battuta remained in Mecca for some time ( the Rihla suggests about three years, from September 1327 until autumn 1330 ).

Ibn Battuta also mentions visiting Sana ' a, but whether he actually did so is doubtful.

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

After a journey along the coast, Ibn Battuta next arrived in the island town of Kilwa in present day Tanzania, which had become an important transit centre of the gold trade.

The siltation of the river delta forced the town further away from water ; In the 14th century, however, Ibn Battutah described Abadan just as a small port in a flat salty plain.

Ibn al-Salah, a hadith specialist, described the relationship between hadith and other aspect of the religion by saying: " It is the science most pervasive in respect to the other sciences in their various branches, in particular to jurisprudence being the most important of them.

While empirical investigations of the natural world have been described since classical antiquity ( for example, by Thales, Aristotle, and others ), and scientific methods have been employed since the Middle Ages ( for example, by Ibn al-Haytham, Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī and Roger Bacon ), the dawn of modern science is generally traced back to the early modern period, during what is known as the Scientific Revolution that took place in 16th and 17th century Europe.

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.

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.

Other writers ( including Joseph Schumpeter ) have traced back the concept even further to Ibn Khaldun, who in his Muqaddimah ( 1377 ), described labor as the source of value, necessary for all earnings and capital accumulation, obvious in the case of craft.

Parabolic mirrors were also described by the physicist Ibn Sahl in the 10th century, and Ibn al-Haytham discussed concave and convex mirrors in both cylindrical and spherical geometries, carried out a number of experiments with mirrors, and solved the problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a ray coming from one point is reflected to another point.

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.

Although named after Dutch astronomer Willebrord Snellius ( 1580 – 1626 ), the law was first accurately described by the Arab scientist Ibn Sahl at Baghdad court, when in 984 he used the law to derive lens shapes that focus light with no geometric aberrations in the manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses ( 984 ).

The law of refraction was first accurately described by Ibn Sahl, of Baghdad, in the manuscript On Burning Mirrors and Lenses ( 984 ).

Ibn Taimiyyah ( 1263 – 1328 ) described the phenomenon as follows:

As a substitute for this, he commented on Plato's The Republic, arguing that the ideal state there described was the same as the original constitution of the Arab Caliphate, as well as the Almohad state of Ibn Tumart.

Bradley Steffens described Ibn al-Haytham as the " first scientist " for his development of scientific method.

In the tenth century, the Arabic scholar Ibn al-Haytham ( Alhazen ) also wrote about observing a solar eclipse through a pinhole, and he described how a sharper image could be produced by making the opening of the pinhole smaller.

It has been suggested that Ibn Khaldun may have had an influence upon Montesquieu's theory through the traveller Jean Chardin, who travelled to Persia and described a theory resembling Ibn Khaldun's climatic theory.

One fringe theory has it that it was the island described by Ibn Rustah as the seat of the khagan of the Rus '.

Ibn abi Dunya, a 9th-century scholar and tutor to the caliphs, described seven censures ( prohibitions against vices ) in his writings:

Ibn Sīnā ( 980 – 1037 ) described the use of tracheal intubation to facilitate breathing in 1025 in his 14-volume medical encyclopedia, The Canon of Medicine.

Of particular interest is the fact that the Schechter Letter account of Oleg's death ( namely, that he fled to and raided FRS, tentatively identified with Persia, and was slain there ) bears remarkable parallels to the account of Arab historians such as Ibn Miskawayh, who described a similar Rus ' attack on the Muslim state of Arran in the year 944 / 5.

Scholars have described Muhammad Hayya as having an important influence on Mohammad Ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, encouraging him to denounce rigid imitation of classical commentaries and to utilize informed individual analysis ( ijtihad ).

Abraham Ibn Daud described HIwi as a sectarian who " denied the Torah, yet used it to formulate a new Torah of his liking ".

By that time, most of the old, seawards city had been abandoned and is described by the Arab geographer Ibn Khurdadhbih as lying in ruins.