{"id":421,"date":"2025-11-13T03:17:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T03:17:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/?p=421"},"modified":"2025-11-13T03:17:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T03:17:07","slug":"the-travels-of-ibn-battutah-khwarizm","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/2025\/11\/13\/the-travels-of-ibn-battutah-khwarizm\/","title":{"rendered":"The Travels of Ibn Battutah: Khwarizm"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ibn Battutah details his travels to Turkestan and Afghanistan quite extensively, particularly his journey to and experience in the town of Khwarizm. It is here that we get more detail than usual about the experience of traveling itself, as Battutah mentions the hardships and happenings on the way from al-Sara. It illuminates just how brutal traveling could be, even for the most seasoned travelers. First, he goes through the toll it takes on the animals they are traveling with. He talked about the animals \u201creach[ing] the limit of the journey\u201d (137) and having to frequently stop to rest their animals or switch them out and find different ones. What surprised me most was that they would not just rest them, but sell and abandon them completely, basing the price off of their exhaustion level. It\u2019s interesting that they seem not to form any attachment to the animals they travel with, and I wonder if it was hard to travel with animals you have no attachment to or that don\u2019t trust and react to you.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Battutah then goes on to describe his own hardships and the physical and mental tolls of traveling. He says they traveled on \u201cforced\u201d marches for thirty full days, stopping \u201conly for two hours each day,\u201d just long enough to make and eat a meal (137). All those on the journey slept (rather uncomfortably, I would assume) in the wagons while they were on the move. Although, of course, for someone of the same class as Battutah, they were allowed the slave girls in their wagon. I do wonder if the comfortability and \u2018furnishings\u2019 of each wagon was determined by class. Would it be a grander and more comfortable wagon for a successful merchant like Battutah than someone of peasant class? I can only assume that Battutah\u2019s wagon had to be relatively large in order to fit him and three slaves with him. By the way that Battutah describes Khwarizm once he reaches it, I wonder if travel ever felt useless or not worth it for what they saw on their sights. While Battutah describes the city as large and grand with fine bazaars, he also says it was uncomfortably crowded, and then just to travel to the bazaar and back was extremely strenuous \u2013 more energy than I can imagine him willing to exert after traveling for so long.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The rest of his account follows quite a similar formula to those we see in other cities. He begins, of course, with an account of the Amir of Khwarizm. He first does something that he does quite frequently, which is to tell what the name of the Amir means. He seems to often associate name meanings greatly with the qualities and honorability of people. We see this in another place in his interactions with the black man who helped him in times of trouble. He trusted him more when he learned what his name meant and its connection to an old Shaikh he had spoken with. Battutah also seems to equate honorability with the home and its embellishments, for he talks little about actual interactions with the Amir, and spends most of his time detailing the spread of food and decoration of his house.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We also see here an insight to the treatment of women in Khwarzim that is different from Battutah\u2019s own. When a heavily dressed woman accompanied by servants passes him, he makes no motion to pay attention to her when she greets him, offering confusion instead. When he learns she is a khatun, a woman of great importance, he feels highly embarrassed. This makes it clear however that women do not hold any roles of that same status in his homeland. Finally, Battutah rounds off the account of the trip by detailing the array of melons, always of course noting their similarities to those kinds of fruits back home, possibly as a way for readers to conceptualize such topics in their own minds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ibn Battutah details his travels to Turkestan and Afghanistan quite extensively, particularly his journey to and experience in the town of Khwarizm. It is here that we get more detail than usual about the experience of traveling itself, as Battutah mentions the hardships and happenings on the way from al-Sara. It illuminates just how brutal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5680,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-421","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ibn-battuta","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5680"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=421"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":422,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/421\/revisions\/422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=421"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=421"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/mapping-middle-ages-2025\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=421"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}