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Updated: June 15, 2025
On leaving Constantinople, Ibn Batuta went again to Astrakhan, thence crossing the sandy wastes of the present Turkestan, he arrived at Khovarezen, a large populous town, then at Bokhara, half destroyed by the armies of Gengis-Khan.
Some time after we hear of him at Samarcand, a religious town which greatly pleased the learned traveller, and then at Balkh which he could not reach without crossing the desert of Khorassan. This town was all in ruins and desolate, for the armies of the barbarians had been there, and Ibn Batuta could not remain in it, but wished to go westward to the frontier of Afghanistan.
He had been almost as great a traveller as his countryman the famous Sheikh Ebn Batuta, whose wanderings are immortalized in the pages of Maga, and came last from Moulmein, with a cargo of black pepper and rubies.
Ibn Batuta, who was an eye-witness of the scenes of horror to which this gave rise, has left us the following description:
We owe the doubtless correct rendering of this passage to the ingenuity of the late Joseph Zedner. See Schechter, Saadyana, p. 25. See Socin, Palestine and Syria, pp. 68 and 99. Ibn Batuta and other Arabic writers have much to say about the Assassins or Mulahids, as they call them.
This was a time when communication between the different countries was both dangerous and difficult, and Ibn Batuta was considered a very bold traveller. Egypt, Arabia, Turkey in Asia, the Caucasian provinces had all in turn been explored by him.
It is the same with the fabulous travels of Jean de Mandeville. Cooley says of them, "They are so utterly untrue, that they have not their parallel in any language." But we find a worthy successor to the Venetian traveller in an Arabian theologian, named Abdallah El Lawati, better known by the name of Ibn Batuta.
The ceremony is more elaborate than the "wallowings" and dust- shovellings described by Ibn Batuta at the Asiatic courts, by Jobson at Tenda,by Chapperton at Oyo,by Denham amongst the Mesgows, and by travellers to Dahome and to the Cazembe. Yet the system is virtually the same in these distant kingdoms, which do not know one another's names.
Batuta relates that during the interval of desolation the king mounted on the roof of his palace, and seeing the city empty and without fire or smoke said, "Now my heart is satisfied and my feelings are appeased." Ibn Batuta was a member of this king's court, and had every opportunity of forming a just conclusion. He sums up his qualities thus:
According to Ibn Batuta, Sultan Muhammad marched southwards against his rebel nephew, Baha-ud-din Gushtasp, who had fled to the protection of the "Rai of Kambila," or "Kampila" as Firishtah calls the place, in his stronghold amongst the mountains.
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