travels in 1334, as part of the ordinary duty of a good Mohammedan
to visit the holy city of Mecca. While at Alexandria he met a learned
sage named Borhan Eddin, to whom he expressed his desire to travel.
Borhan said to him, "You must then visit my brother Farid Iddin and
my brother Rokn Eddin in Scindia, and my brother Borhan Eddin in
China. When you see them, present my compliments to them." Owing
mainly to the fact that the Tatar princes had adopted Islamism
instead of Christianity, after the failure of Gregory X. to send
Christian teachers to China, Ibn Batuta was ultimately enabled to
greet all three brothers of Borhan Eddin. Indeed, he performed
a more extraordinary exploit, for he was enabled to convey the
greetings of the Sheikh Kawan Eddin, whom he met in China, to a
relative of his residing in the Soudan. During the thirty years
of his travels he visited the Holy Land, Armenia, the Crimea,
Constantinople (which he visited in company with a Greek princess,
who married one of the Tatar Khans), Bokhara, Afghanistan, and
Delhi. Here he found favour with the emperor Mohammed Inghlak,
who appointed him a judge, and sent him on an embassy to China,
at first overland, but, as this was found too dangerous a route,
he went ultimately from Calicut, via Ceylon, the Maldives, and
Sumatra, to Zaitun, then the great port of China. Civil war having
broken out, he returned by the same route to Calicut, but dared
not face the emperor, and went on to Ormuz and Mecca, and returned
to Tangier in 1349. But even then his taste for travel had not been
exhausted. He soon set out for Spain, and worked his way through
Morocco, across the Sahara, to the Soudan. He travelled along the Niger
(which he took for the Nile), and visited Timbuctoo. He ultimately
returned to Fez in 1353, twenty-eight years after he had set out on
his travels. Their chief interest is in showing the wide extent of
Islam in his day, and the facilities which a common creed gave for