The penultimate part of the Riḥla by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa recounts his return journey to Morocco from the Middle East through North Africa—and another short tour in al-Andalus—between January 1348 and March 1350. At that time, in all these territories the plague pandemic known as the Black Death was raging and references to it punctuate this part of the work like a tired refrain. As numerous studies have shown borrowings and adaptations from other sources in the Riḥla, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may not have made all the journeys he claims, but to date no one has questioned his journey through the Arabian area in those years. On the contrary, historians of the Black Death regard the Riḥla as an important document for the study of the scourge in the Middle East and North Africa.
In this paper I aim to reconstruct the narrative of the pandemic in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Riḥla by taking from the text the passages in which it is mentioned, in order to answer some questions: to which places do these passages refer? What information does the Riḥla give about the disease, its effects and people’s reaction? Does it correspond to that provided by the Arab chronicles? Does it fit with current microbiology, genetics and palaeogenetics research? Since the Riḥla is a narrative work, how does it describe the scourge? Does its description differ from that of the chroniclers?
The concluding paragraph seeks an answer to two more questions: does the Riḥla report Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s experience or might he and/or the editor of the work, Ibn Ǧuzayy, have taken information from other sources? And if Ibn Baṭṭūṭa did make this journey, thus probably being the only traveller who left an account of a “two-year journey under the arrows of the Black Death,” how could he return home unscathed?
The famous Moroccan traveller Muḥammad b. Baṭṭūṭa, who left Tangier in 1325, claims to have made a journey that took him across most of the then Islamicate world. The country in which he recounts having stayed the longest was India, where he says he remained from 1333 to 1341/1342, mostly in the Islamic Sultanate of Delhi. A long section of his Riḥla is dedicated to the sub-continent and modern historians of this region ascribe to it an important documentary value, although it has been argued that Ibn Baṭṭūṭa may have borrowed – not to imply copied – information from other sources in other parts of the work. As concerns India, Ibn Baṭṭūṭa speaks of two epidemics and one deadly disease that occurred in 1334–5 and 1344. Some scholars have referred to them as cholera, while others have suggested it was the plague – thus supporting the hypothesis that the medieval plague pandemic had struck India before reaching the Middle East. How did this confusion arise? What exactly does Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla relate? Do Indo-Persian sources confirm these epidemics? Do they and/or Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla allow us to discount the presence of the Medieval Plague in India, or rather do they assert it?
In order to answer these questions, this paper analyses the information on the Indian epidemics in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa's Riḥla and compares the text with its translations in the principal European languages and with Indo-Persian chronicles. These analyses reveal something of a lexical muddle which, in my opinion, has contributed to some errors and misunderstandings regarding the diseases in question. But another question arises: is it possible to read the information provided by Ibn Baṭṭūṭa and the Indian chronicles in a consilient way, that is, taking into account not only the analysis of written documents, but also the recent and current findings in genetics of plague, and in particular on the Black Death? Finally, an attempt is made to answer a question that has to be asked, particularly in light of the criticism often levelled at Ibn Baṭṭūṭa. Considering that in one of these events he claims to have witnessed the epidemic, is there any reason to suppose that he did not? Regarding the other two events that he did not claim to witness firsthand, is there any cause to doubt his claims?
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