A century and a half late, but the first eyewitness of places that in 1200 are known only from hearsay: Zeila and its stench, Mogadishu with its sultan, qadi and merchant hosts, Mombasa, and Kilwa under the Mahdali sultan Abu'l-Muzaffar al-Hasan, raiding the Zanj of the mainland; and the Sahara road from Sijilmasa through Taghaza and Walata to the court of Mali under Mansa Sulayman, then Timbuktu, Gao and Takedda among the veiled Berbers. Institutions he describes (the Swahili sultanates, the Massufa in the desert towns, the gold trade, the Friday-mosque courts) were older than his visit, and for the Swahili towns and Gao he is the first real description. He also shows the Maghreb under the Marinids who had replaced the Almohads. Dictated from memory with borrowings, so details can be wrong.
About this source
- Title
- Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara'ib al-amsar wa-aja'ib al-asfar (the African journeys)
- Author
- Ibn Battuta (dictated to Ibn Juzayy)
- Author's dates
- 1304 to 1368 or 1369
- Written
- 1355, at Fez
- Language
- Arabic
- Covers
- journeys of 1325 to 1354: Egypt 1326, Zeila, Mogadishu, Mombasa and Kilwa about 1331, Mali and the Sahara 1352 to 1353
- Kind
- Travel account
Gibb and Beckingham's English translation is under copyright. The Internet Archive copies of Defrémery and Sanguinetti are catalogued inconsistently by volume; the East African journey is in vol. 2 and the Mali journey in vol. 4 of the printed set. Another entry in this library covers Ibn Battuta for Asia.
Where to read it
Editions
- C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti (eds and trs), Voyages d'Ibn Batoutah, 4 vols (Paris, 1853 to 1858), Arabic text with French translation: vol. 1 (1853)
- The same, the volume of 1858
Translations
- H. A. R. Gibb and C. F. Beckingham (trs), The Travels of Ibn Battuta, 4 vols (Hakluyt Society, Cambridge and London, 1958 to 1994), English (not freely online)
- English extracts in Levtzion and Hopkins (Mali) and Freeman-Grenville (the coast) (not freely online)
Read it online
About the source
Realms this source covers in 1200
- Mogadishu and its elders
- Kilwa under its Shirazi sultans, with Mafia
- The Swahili towns
- Zeila
- The Somali clans
- The Mande chiefdoms (Manden)
- Gao (Kawkaw): the Songhay kingdom
- The veiled Berbers of the central Sahara (the later Tuareg)
- The veiled Sanhaja of the western Sahara
- The oases of the northern Sahara
- The Almohad caliphate of Muhammad al-Nasir
- Ayyubid Egypt under the boy sultan al-Mansur