August 2, 2017 • 32 mins
Ibn Battuta's 14th-century travels were extensive. He was away from home for roughly 24 years and during that time traveled through virtually every Muslim nation and territory, becoming the traveler of the age.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So.
Back in the spring of we did a podcast on Jungha.
Remember Jengha I do? Indeed, Jengha led a fleet of
(00:24):
treasure ships on huge and far reaching voyages from China
to Southern Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Eastern Africa in
the fifteenth century. And one of the points we made
in that episode was that it wasn't necessarily accurate to
call Jungha an explorer, because he wasn't so much exploring
as following roots that were known already, and we said
(00:47):
that in some cases they were actually roots that a
man named Ibn Batuta had traveled from the opposite direction
a century before. Today we are finally going to talk
about about Abdellah Mahabad, even a Della, even Ibrahim Alawatti,
Altanji ibn Batuta, who has been requested by some listeners,
including Julie and Jennifer, and he's commonly just known as
(01:09):
Ibn Batuta. Like Jungha, ibn Batuta wasn't so much an explorer.
His travels took him to places that were already known
within the Muslim world, and they were part of that world.
Mostly he traveled along well traveled roots, but these travels
were extensive. He was away from home for roughly twenty
(01:29):
four years and during that time traveled through virtually every
Muslim nation and territory, becoming the traveler of the age.
Ibn Batuta was born on February four, which was the
year seven oh three in the Islamic calendar. We found
multiple different conversions of the exact date in the Islamic calendar,
(01:50):
so keep that in mind. They differed by one to
two days, and I don't trust my own conversion enough
to rely on that. He was born in Tangier, which
is a port city in Morocco, and although it wasn't
Morocco's busiest port, Tangier's position between the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic meant that it was a frequent departure point for
(02:12):
ships bound across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Iberian
Peninsula or to other parts of Europe and Africa. And
this meant that although Tangier was a Muslim city, it
also saw lots of Christian visitors and merchants. Who arrived
from places like Genoa, Marseilles, and Majorca. Apart from the
father and grandfather who were referenced in his name Eban
(02:34):
means son of we don't really know a lot about
iban Betuta's family. They were Sunni Muslims who were of
an indigenous North African people known as the Latta, and
several were kadi's or judges, or they were otherwise scholars
of Islamic law. Iban Betuta's upbringing was probably typical for
a Muslim child living in Northern Africa in the fourteenth century.
(02:57):
He would have attended school, either at a moss or
through a private tutor. His early education would have focused
on the Koran, along with subjects like arithmetic and grammar,
and literature and history. For students from more prominent families,
which ibn Batuta was more advanced, study followed as children
got older. We do know for sure that Ibn Batuta's
(03:20):
study of the Koran and of Islamic law were really lifelong.
He learned the whole Koran by heart, and he wrote
of reciting it to himself from beginning to end as
he traveled, sometimes twice when he felt like he needed
to bolster himself up a little more, and when he
was twenty one by the Gregorian calendar and twenty two
by the Islamic Lunar calendar, Ibn Batuta began preparing for
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the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, that is one of
the five pillars of Islam, and this was for him
a religious duty. It's an obligation for all Muslims who
are physically and financially able to go, and whose families
won't be harmed by their being away, And it was
also something he genuinely wanted to do, describing himself as
quote swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a
(04:05):
desire long cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.
Ibn Batuta's pilgrimage was also an opportunity to further his education.
Although Tangier was a notable ports city, it wasn't particularly
known for its scholars and it didn't have a college.
So Ibn Batuta's pilgrimage would allow him to study with
(04:27):
legal scholars and with Sufi mystics and cities like Tunis, Alexandria,
and Cairo along the way, studying with more prominent scholars
was an opportunity for Ibn Batuta to deepen his own
knowledge of Islamic law. It's the body of guiding rules
and principles that govern Muslims daily lives and worship, also
known as Sharia, and enhancing his legal training would give
(04:49):
him access to more prestigious work. But this wasn't simply
a means to moving up a career ladder, because the
law even Batuta was studying was rooted in the Islamic
faith and was inseparable from that faith. His religious and
legal educations were also inseparable from one another. On top
of the intertwined nature of his religious and legal education,
(05:12):
the concept of seeking knowledge is an important part of
Islam in general. Both the Koran and the Hadith, which
is a record of the sayings and actions of the
prophet Mohammed, have multiple references to learning and seeking knowledge,
including how to seek knowledge in a way that's ethical
and compatible with Islam. So essentially, seeking knowledge is an
(05:33):
act of worship and it's incumbent upon all Muslims to learn.
One hadith that frequently comes up in relation to Ibn
Batuta is seek knowledge even as far as China, Although
there are some questions about whether that one is correctly attributed.
Those same basic concepts are definitely present in others. Ibn
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Batuta left for Mecca on June fourteenth of thirteen twenty five,
which was the year seven twenty five and the Islamic calendar.
Although many pilgrims traveled to Mecca as part of an
official organized caravan, and Ibban Batuta may have been planning
to join a caravan later on in the journey, he
initially set off alone over land, following the North African coast,
(06:16):
and even though Ibn Batuta embarked alone, the Hajj is
an annual religious observance, so other Muslims were also setting
out for Mecca on their own pilgrimages, generally following the
same roads and routs through northern Africa. So after about
three weeks, he fell in with two companions, although they
separated after they both got sick due to the severe
(06:37):
summer heat. One companion actually died and the other returned
that person's body home. A little later in the journey
across northern Africa, ibn Batuta fell ill as well, one
of several serious illnesses he contracted during his travels. When
someone suggested he stay in a town for a while
to recover, Ibban Batuta replied, if God decrees my death,
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it shall be on the road with my face set
towards the land of Hadjas. As he traveled, iban Batuta
would stop for a time in cities and towns, and
the length of his stay would depend on everything from
his health, to the travel conditions to whether there were
important scholars in residents. For example, he spent two months
in Tunas, studying at the College of the Booksellers and
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being appointed kadi of a pilgrim caravan. When he left there,
he also entered into a marriage contract with the daughter
of a Tunisian official who was part of that caravan.
The two men eventually had some kind of falling out
and broke that contract. Shortly thereafter, Ibban Batuta entered into
a marriage contract with a different woman, the daughter of
another pilgrim who was a scholar from Fizz, and she
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would be the first of several wives and concubines, some
of them enslaved that Ibn Batuta would bring into his life.
Iban Batuta and the company of pilgrims he was traveling
with arrived in Alexandria at the Nila River delta in
the early spring of thirteen six. He stayed there for
about a month, visiting holy sites, studying, and also doing
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some sight seeing, including touring the city's textile district, but
eventually he decided it was time to move on again.
The timing of his journey and the time that he'd
spent in Alexandria meant that at this point he wasn't
lined up with the season for pilgrimage caravans anymore, so
there was no official company for him to join. He
was once again on his own. His plan was to
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follow the banks of the Nile River south to a
town near the modern border with Sudan, and from there
he would travel overland to the Red Sea, board a
boat to Jetta and travel overland from there to Mecca.
The trip up the Nile took about three weeks, but
then when he got to the Red Sea, it turned
out that most of the boats in the port had
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been destroyed during a dispute between the local ruling family
and the governor, so he had to turn back, this
time taking a boat down the Nile, getting back to
Alexandria in about eight days, spending one night there before
lee being for Syria, and the reason he only spent
one night was that at this point the season for
official travel to Mecca was approaching, and he thought if
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he made good enough time, he could join a caravan
leaving out of Damascus. On the way. He stayed for
about a week in Jerusalem, but even so he got
to Damascus with enough time to spare that he stayed
there for nearly a month. Although he had been continuing
his studies throughout the trip. In Damascus, he continued them formally,
earning several official certifications in different law texts. In Damascus,
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Ivan Batuta finally did join an official caravan bound for
Mecca that he stayed with for the rest of the
trip there, which we will talk about after a quick
sponsor break. Ivan Batuta set out with a large caravan
of pilgrims from Damascus on September one. This was more
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than a year after leaving his home in Tangier. He
doesn't specifically say how many people were in this caravan,
but it was likely several thousand. Official caravans traveling to
Mecca were and are very large. First, they went to Medina,
which is about eight hundred twenty miles or roughly dred
kilometers away from Damascus, and the travel there took about
(10:16):
fifty days. Once they're pilgrims took part in several days
of religious rituals, including at the Mosque of the Prophet,
and then from Medina it was another two hundred miles
or three hundred twenty kilometers to Mecca, where even Batuta
finally arrived in October thirteen twenty six. After the Hajj,
which involves several days of religious observances and rituals, most
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pilgrims returned home, but even Betuta did not. Early in
his journey, he'd had a dream of a great bird
sweeping him away over a far distance. He'd also meant
an ascetic who told him that he would meet and
offer greetings to the ascetics three brothers, one in India
when in sind and one in China. Sind is now Pakistan.
(11:01):
But aside from these more romantic ideas, even Batuta thought
that if he continued to travel, he could continue to
learn and to find work as a kadi, and instead
of turning west toward home, he went north and then
east toward what's now a Rock in the company of
returning pilgrims from that region, Although he did make several
stops along him the way, his primary goal at this
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point was to visit the city of Baghdad. Baghdad had
been besieged and then sacked during the Mongol invasion in
twelve fifty eight, and that was a little less than
seventy years before Ivan Batuta's arrival. That sacking is generally
considered to be the end of the Islamic Golden Age,
so when Ibn Batuta went there, he was envisioning it
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as sort of witnessing one of the great cities that
had been He also stopped in most of the major
cities in the area and took a tour up the
Tigris River. From there, he returned to Mecca with another
Hajj caravan, this time staying for at least a year,
during which time he both studied and performed the rituals
associated with the lesser pilgrimage a number of times. He
(12:08):
left Mecca again in either thirteen twenty eight or thirteen
thirty Exactly when is a little bit unclear, but whichever
it was, he spent the next two years traveling mainly
by boats to cities along the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf,
and the Arabian Sea. He went as far south as
Kilwa on the African coast in what's now Tanzania, but
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was at the time part of the Kilwa sultan It.
After two years of mostly seafaring wandering, he once again
joined a pilgrimage caravan Sebecca, traveling over land across the
entirety of the Arabian Peninsula before observing the Hajj for
a third time. By this point, Ivan Batuta had learned
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that the Sultan of Delhi, Mohammed Touluk, had invited scholars
to India, and that many who made their way there
were finding themselves with prestigious appointments that came along with
lavish gift. The Sultan had made a practice of specifically
filling posts with foreign visitors, and even Batuta hoped to
be one of them. But to get there and to
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get an appointment, he needed a guide who spoke Persian
New India well and had contacts there who could help
Ibn Batuta on his way. His initial plan seems to
have been to try to find such a guide in
Jetta and then to have a relatively straightforward sea voyage
to India, but he couldn't find someone with the skills
and connections that he needed, so instead he set off
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on a much much more circuitous route overland, perhaps thinking
that he might meet someone along the way. He first
made his way back to Cairo and from there to
the port city of Latakia on the Syrian coast, before
taking a ship across the Mediterranean Sea to Alanna in
Anatolia on the coast of what is now Turkey. And
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he then undertook a very roundabout two year trek that
went to Constantinople, through the Byzantine Empire, across the Asian Step,
and then through Afghanistan, finally crossing the Indus River in
thirty three or thirty five. He essentially went quite far
to the north, following a zigzagging path between the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea before dropping southeast into India.
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If you look at a map, this was not just
an indirect way to go. Crossing the Asian Step was
also far more difficult than going by sea or by
following some of the other overland routes. Taking the path
that was both the long way and the hard way
may have been because Matuta had already seen several of
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the cities along the Arabian Sea that they would have
passed through if he had gone that way. Instead, he
had resolved to never travel a path that he had
traveled before if there was some other option available. It
seems like it would get so problematic in a hurry,
and apparently it did. There are there are lots of
maps of his voyages online and there is very doll
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like the arrow going two directions on the same faith,
and when it is it's usually like okay, yeah, that's
there's not really a different way to go. Ib Batuta
spent about eight years in India, where he was named
Cutty of Delhi, although for his first several months there
he spent his time accompanying the Sultan on hunting expeditions
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rather than hearing legal cases. He also had some trouble
with money. He had purchased gifts for the Sultan, including horses, camels,
and enslaved people along the way with the hope that
it was going to help him secure a good appointment,
and although his appointment as Catty came with an income,
he just didn't have the same pool of wealth as
many of the other Deli elite to draw from. And
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he was expected to maintain an opulent lifestyle and to
spend some of his income on gifts and payments to others,
so he was soon in debt. Apart from his financial problem, says,
years in India overall also weren't particularly easy due to
a combination of famines, uprisings, and political intrigue. At this point,
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India had a majority Hindu population that was being ruled
by a minority Muslim government, which leads to ongoing uprisings
and religious violence. Around thirteen forty, Ibn Batuta was appointed
to lead an envoy from Delhi to China, and he
left in the summer of thirteen forty one. He was
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tasked with ensuring the safety of a huge retinue, including
hundreds of people and gifts, including textiles, dishware, and weapons.
Although they traveled under armed guard, they were attacked by
Hindu insurgents only a few days out from Delhi. Ibn
Batuta was attacked and robbed a second time while waiting
for reinforcements after that first incident, and then he became
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lost for six days after escaping from his captors. After
this inauspicious beginning, the expedition ended disastrously in early thirteen
forty two, when the whole fleet of four ships at
this point they had moved to a sea voyage, was
forced aground and wrecked in a storm off the port
of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. Most of
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their retinue was also killed in this storm and shipwrecks,
including the other two highest ranking officials that had been
dispatched from Delhi. Edmund Betuta only survived because he had
moved from the junk where the diplomatic envoy was supposed
to be sleeping, to another ship because the room that
was assigned to him on the diplomatic junk was just
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too small for his taste. Although he wanted to return
to Delhi and tell the Sultan what had happened, he
didn't feel like he could, at least not right away.
Not only had the entire retinue and all of its
goods been lost on his watch, but he would also
have to explain why he had survived while the other
officials had not. He'd also lost nearly everything he had
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in that storm. He wound up stranded for months before
finally finding passage to Honavar on the western coast of
India on a fleet of ships that belonged to the Sultan.
Once he got there, though, the situation was not much better.
He had hoped to find a patron and some kind
of appointment that would allow him the time and the
resources to figure out what he should do next, and
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perhaps even to recoup some of his lost income. Instead,
he wound up spending most of the summer of thirteen
forty two and devotional seclusion, praying and reciting the Koran
twice through every day. He was basically offered housing in
a like this one person's room, and he was like, yeah,
I don't really have work for you. You can stay here, though,
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So he basically stayed there in prayer for months, and
finally he decided to go to China on his own,
staying for a time in the Maldives and acting again
as Cutty before going on to China by sea. By
this point he had been to so many places and
could tell stories of so many other courts that he
was received enthusiastically and he was compensated generously once he
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left them all be there's some dispute about exactly how
far into China he did go, in part because he
didn't give a lot of detail about China when he
wrote about his travels. This lack of detail has led
some critics to suggest that he did not go to
China at all. And while he probably did not get
nearly as far as the account of his trip suggests,
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with some of that probably being embellished when it was
being written, he almost certainly did visit the more southeastern
parts of China. His lack of detail is more likely
because the Muslim population there was relatively small, and that
was really what he was most interested in learning from
and writing about. So he just had a lot less
interest in China and a lot less to say about it.
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And it was after visiting China that iban Batuta decided
at last to return home after undertaking the Hajj one
last time. We're going to talk about all of that
after we have a little sponsor break, finally abandoning the
idea of returning to India to explain what had happened
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to the convoy. Even Matuta began working his way toward
home in thirteen forty seven by way of one last
pilgrimage to Mecca that would be his fourth during his lifetime.
Rather than waiting for the next pilgrimage season, he took
a wandering route through Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and
in Damascus, Syria, he learned that his father had died
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about fifteen years before. He decided to travel to Aleppo
in the summer of thirty eight, which turned out to
be just as the Black Death began moving through the region.
For the next several months, his travels took him through
cities and towns that were ravaged by the plague. For
a time, he got ahead of the spread of the disease,
but it caught up with him again in Mecca, where
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he spent four months awaiting the Hajj. After his fourth hodge,
he began traveling finally toward Tangier, but once he arrived
there after his decades of absence, he learned earned that
his mother had died of the plague only about six
months before. Ibn Batuta didn't stay at home for long.
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He soon set out once again for a brief tour
of Granada across the Strait of Gibraltar, followed by a
return to Africa and a tour to the south, crossing
the Sahara Desert to the Kingdom of Mali and the
city of Timbuctwo. Iban Batuta finally returned to Fez, which
was then the capital of Morocco, in thirteen fifty four,
and as far as we know, he spent the rest
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of his life in or near Morocco. The Sultan Abu
Nan asked him to write an account of his journey,
and in doing this, Iban Beatuta worked with an Amanuensis
iban Juse, who was also a court poet. Ivan Jus
made his language poetic, added some actual poems, and probably
embellished a few things, while also bringing Ivan Matuta's account
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in line with literary standards of the time. The end
result of all this work was finished on December fifty
five five. It's full Arabic title roughly translates to a
gift to those who contemplate the wonders of cities and
the marvels of traveling. It's more commonly known as the RelA,
although RelA is really a genre essentially a travelogue within
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Islamic literature had been Betuta's RelA chronicles has traveled through
essentially the entire fourteenth century Muslim world. He had gone
seventy five thousand miles or a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers,
that is three times farther than Marco Polo's journeys and
three times the circumference of the Earth. Along the way,
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he visited what's now forty different modern countries. He met
at least sixty heads of state and a wealth of
lesser leaders and dignitaries, and he served as an advisor
to at least twelve different rulers. He also met all
three brothers of the Ascetic that he had heard about
so early in his journey, and did indeed offer them greetings.
(23:00):
The RelA is about one thousand pages long, and since
he was reconstructing it from memory after the end of
his travels, it's chronology is sometimes a little bit mixed
up or vague, but otherwise it stands as a wide
ranging account of what the Islamic world was like in
the fourteenth century. The world was and still is huge,
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but it's not at all monolithic. It's people are united
by the core belief in the Koran and by the
idea that the tenets of Islam create a bond that
is greater than ethnicity or race. Yeah, if you're if
you're looking at the chronology of his travels and you
kind of go does that make sense? You may have
even thought does that make sense? In some of this
episode so far. It's because he was basically reconstructing it
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later on, and and sometimes talking about places that he
passed through more than one time, so sometimes a little
seems a little mixed up. As Iman Batuta traveled, he
observed the diversity of Islam, seeing how it was filtered
through Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Mongol cultures. He wrote about
how people worshiped, how they interpreted the law, and what
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their holy sites were like, along with describing the cities themselves,
in their cuisine and their environment, and things like whether
they were clean. The book gradually reveals some of Iman
Betuta's personality and tells us a little about the world
view of an educated, devout fourteenth century Muslim. He was
a pious man who could sometimes come off as a
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bit of a busybody, even beyond what might be expected
of a man whose job was to be a judge.
But he was also gregarious and highly curious about the world. Otherwise, though,
there's really very little about his personal life. For example,
he married at least seven women, and he had children
with at least some of them. In addition to having
numerous concubines, although none of these people play a part
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in the text beyond the mention of their marriage or
occasionally their death. And we also get nothing about his
homecoming and what happened when he met friends and family
that he'd been separated from for almost a quarter of
a century, or when he learned how many of them
had died in the Black Death. And this was really
typical of writing at the time. It was not considered
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really appropriate to be talking about your personal business in
public anyway, so it would have been doubly inappropriate if
he had filled his book up with a lot of
personal details about his life. So like that is not
a typical at all. Also, when we say he comes
off sometimes it's a bit of a busybody. The story
that to me typ of eyes at the best is
there was there's one part in his relo or he
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writes about going into a bath house and some of
the men didn't have waste coverings on. And his response
to this was to go to the governor of the
town and to tell the governor of the town that
there were some men in the bath house that didn't
have waste coverings on, and then get the governor all
riled up about it, followed by a crackdown on whether
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there were waste coverings in the bath houses. On the
one hand, there's expected that men would have waste coverings
on on the other hand, there were definitely a lot
of people involved in the situation who were like man
Ivan Beatuda business who went right to escalation on that one. Yeah.
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So the a lot of people in their descriptions of
Ivan Beatuda use words like kind of a fuss budget
or little judgmental uh, and that that kind of uh,
that kind of account is why. So this book was
largely unknown until the nineteenth century and even in the
Arabic speaking world. Although various additions exist in libraries in
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North Africa and the Middle East dating from the time
after it was written, it does not seem to have
been very widely read between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. However,
in a weird turn of events, French scholars found five
manuscripts in Algeria after the French occupied Algeria in the
eighteen thirties, and these scholars began trying to piece together translations.
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A lot of the first translations in English were very
heavily abridged, unsurprisingly because it has a thousand pages long
and a complete English language translation project started in nineteen
nine the Hackleyott Society, which is an English society that
publishes scholarly editions of primary source texts about travel in geography,
which is an amazingly specific mission. UH published the first
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three volumes by the mid twentieth century, but the fourth
volume didn't come out until I think. And it's actually
unclear when Ibn Batuta died, although it was in the
year seven hundred in the Islamic calendar, which would have
been thirteen sixty eight or thirteen sixty nine. A two
man tangier is traditionally considered to be his, but we
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don't actually know if that's the case today. There's also
a shopping mall name for him in Dubai, and its
courts are all themed after places that he went, and
a lot of commentators are like, I'm not sure if
I Tuda thought would have thought this was cool or not? Yeah,
he like he did. I mean, obviously, he traveled for
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almost a quarter of a century in a time when
travel was a lot more uncomfortable and and time consuming
than it is in a lot of the world today.
But the like the fact that, um he he was
so particular about things. Uh. Sometimes people are like what
I be Tuda walk in here and be like, oh, yeah,
this is cool. I like to look at this place.
(28:31):
Or would he be more like, mmm, I'm not sure, Yeah,
we don't know. It's don't really new. Hey, Tracy, do
you have a listener mail from far Afield? Sure do uh,
and it is a correction from Jacob. Jacob says, Dear
Tracy and Holly. I love the show and have heard
almost every episode going all the way back. I'm so
glad you're covering such a fascinating and dramatic period of history,
(28:54):
especially since there is so much mythology and downright ignorance
about it. I should take a moment and note we're
talking about our dune Kirk evacuation episodes here, which she
said in the title, but I did not read the title.
I couldn't help, but notice you said. Nazi Germany invaded
Denmark and Norway in May of nineteen forty, essentially simultaneously
(29:15):
with the invasion of the Low Countries in France. I
believe the Scandinavian invasions began in early April so roughly
one month before the start of the Western Offensive, and
while certainly the two operations were well coordinated, they were
not quite simultaneous. Thanks again for the great program, Best Jacob.
Jacob is exactly right. Not only was this onecent my error,
(29:39):
it is an error I introduced in my own revisions
of the script that was like I had written it
correctly in the first place, and then as I was
you know, reading through and reading through and making sure
everything was right, I was like, what am I even
talking about? This was not in April. This was in May.
It was not in May. It was in April. I
(29:59):
had right the first time. So, uh, that is my error.
I apologize, especially because, uh, that is an error that
meaningfully changes our description of things. Um, it was not
literally the next day after invading the Scandinavian countries that
Germany invaded the Low countries. So what you're telling me
(30:22):
is that you're not a perfect history robot. Mm hmmm,
I'm super not a perfect shocking. I think this has
all of the categories of error that I hate the most.
It is a mistake I made, and not a mistake
that was like repeated a lot of places that I
also picked up. And it's also a mistake that meaningfully
(30:45):
changed what we were saying, rather than like we said,
that was Thursday and it was really Wednesday, and it
doesn't really affect anything in the long grand scheme of things. Uh,
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Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I am Tracy V. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. So.
Back in the spring of we did a podcast on Jungha.
Remember Jengha I do? Indeed, Jengha led a fleet of
(00:24):
treasure ships on huge and far reaching voyages from China
to Southern Asia, the Arabian Peninsula, and Eastern Africa in
the fifteenth century. And one of the points we made
in that episode was that it wasn't necessarily accurate to
call Jungha an explorer, because he wasn't so much exploring
as following roots that were known already, and we said
(00:47):
that in some cases they were actually roots that a
man named Ibn Batuta had traveled from the opposite direction
a century before. Today we are finally going to talk
about about Abdellah Mahabad, even a Della, even Ibrahim Alawatti,
Altanji ibn Batuta, who has been requested by some listeners,
including Julie and Jennifer, and he's commonly just known as
(01:09):
Ibn Batuta. Like Jungha, ibn Batuta wasn't so much an explorer.
His travels took him to places that were already known
within the Muslim world, and they were part of that world.
Mostly he traveled along well traveled roots, but these travels
were extensive. He was away from home for roughly twenty
(01:29):
four years and during that time traveled through virtually every
Muslim nation and territory, becoming the traveler of the age.
Ibn Batuta was born on February four, which was the
year seven oh three in the Islamic calendar. We found
multiple different conversions of the exact date in the Islamic calendar,
(01:50):
so keep that in mind. They differed by one to
two days, and I don't trust my own conversion enough
to rely on that. He was born in Tangier, which
is a port city in Morocco, and although it wasn't
Morocco's busiest port, Tangier's position between the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic meant that it was a frequent departure point for
(02:12):
ships bound across the Strait of Gibraltar to the Iberian
Peninsula or to other parts of Europe and Africa. And
this meant that although Tangier was a Muslim city, it
also saw lots of Christian visitors and merchants. Who arrived
from places like Genoa, Marseilles, and Majorca. Apart from the
father and grandfather who were referenced in his name Eban
(02:34):
means son of we don't really know a lot about
iban Betuta's family. They were Sunni Muslims who were of
an indigenous North African people known as the Latta, and
several were kadi's or judges, or they were otherwise scholars
of Islamic law. Iban Betuta's upbringing was probably typical for
a Muslim child living in Northern Africa in the fourteenth century.
(02:57):
He would have attended school, either at a moss or
through a private tutor. His early education would have focused
on the Koran, along with subjects like arithmetic and grammar,
and literature and history. For students from more prominent families,
which ibn Batuta was more advanced, study followed as children
got older. We do know for sure that Ibn Batuta's
(03:20):
study of the Koran and of Islamic law were really lifelong.
He learned the whole Koran by heart, and he wrote
of reciting it to himself from beginning to end as
he traveled, sometimes twice when he felt like he needed
to bolster himself up a little more, and when he
was twenty one by the Gregorian calendar and twenty two
by the Islamic Lunar calendar, Ibn Batuta began preparing for
(03:43):
the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, that is one of
the five pillars of Islam, and this was for him
a religious duty. It's an obligation for all Muslims who
are physically and financially able to go, and whose families
won't be harmed by their being away, And it was
also something he genuinely wanted to do, describing himself as
quote swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a
(04:05):
desire long cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries.
Ibn Batuta's pilgrimage was also an opportunity to further his education.
Although Tangier was a notable ports city, it wasn't particularly
known for its scholars and it didn't have a college.
So Ibn Batuta's pilgrimage would allow him to study with
(04:27):
legal scholars and with Sufi mystics and cities like Tunis, Alexandria,
and Cairo along the way, studying with more prominent scholars
was an opportunity for Ibn Batuta to deepen his own
knowledge of Islamic law. It's the body of guiding rules
and principles that govern Muslims daily lives and worship, also
known as Sharia, and enhancing his legal training would give
(04:49):
him access to more prestigious work. But this wasn't simply
a means to moving up a career ladder, because the
law even Batuta was studying was rooted in the Islamic
faith and was inseparable from that faith. His religious and
legal educations were also inseparable from one another. On top
of the intertwined nature of his religious and legal education,
(05:12):
the concept of seeking knowledge is an important part of
Islam in general. Both the Koran and the Hadith, which
is a record of the sayings and actions of the
prophet Mohammed, have multiple references to learning and seeking knowledge,
including how to seek knowledge in a way that's ethical
and compatible with Islam. So essentially, seeking knowledge is an
(05:33):
act of worship and it's incumbent upon all Muslims to learn.
One hadith that frequently comes up in relation to Ibn
Batuta is seek knowledge even as far as China, Although
there are some questions about whether that one is correctly attributed.
Those same basic concepts are definitely present in others. Ibn
(05:54):
Batuta left for Mecca on June fourteenth of thirteen twenty five,
which was the year seven twenty five and the Islamic calendar.
Although many pilgrims traveled to Mecca as part of an
official organized caravan, and Ibban Batuta may have been planning
to join a caravan later on in the journey, he
initially set off alone over land, following the North African coast,
(06:16):
and even though Ibn Batuta embarked alone, the Hajj is
an annual religious observance, so other Muslims were also setting
out for Mecca on their own pilgrimages, generally following the
same roads and routs through northern Africa. So after about
three weeks, he fell in with two companions, although they
separated after they both got sick due to the severe
(06:37):
summer heat. One companion actually died and the other returned
that person's body home. A little later in the journey
across northern Africa, ibn Batuta fell ill as well, one
of several serious illnesses he contracted during his travels. When
someone suggested he stay in a town for a while
to recover, Ibban Batuta replied, if God decrees my death,
(06:59):
it shall be on the road with my face set
towards the land of Hadjas. As he traveled, iban Batuta
would stop for a time in cities and towns, and
the length of his stay would depend on everything from
his health, to the travel conditions to whether there were
important scholars in residents. For example, he spent two months
in Tunas, studying at the College of the Booksellers and
(07:20):
being appointed kadi of a pilgrim caravan. When he left there,
he also entered into a marriage contract with the daughter
of a Tunisian official who was part of that caravan.
The two men eventually had some kind of falling out
and broke that contract. Shortly thereafter, Ibban Batuta entered into
a marriage contract with a different woman, the daughter of
another pilgrim who was a scholar from Fizz, and she
(07:43):
would be the first of several wives and concubines, some
of them enslaved that Ibn Batuta would bring into his life.
Iban Batuta and the company of pilgrims he was traveling
with arrived in Alexandria at the Nila River delta in
the early spring of thirteen six. He stayed there for
about a month, visiting holy sites, studying, and also doing
(08:03):
some sight seeing, including touring the city's textile district, but
eventually he decided it was time to move on again.
The timing of his journey and the time that he'd
spent in Alexandria meant that at this point he wasn't
lined up with the season for pilgrimage caravans anymore, so
there was no official company for him to join. He
was once again on his own. His plan was to
(08:26):
follow the banks of the Nile River south to a
town near the modern border with Sudan, and from there
he would travel overland to the Red Sea, board a
boat to Jetta and travel overland from there to Mecca.
The trip up the Nile took about three weeks, but
then when he got to the Red Sea, it turned
out that most of the boats in the port had
(08:47):
been destroyed during a dispute between the local ruling family
and the governor, so he had to turn back, this
time taking a boat down the Nile, getting back to
Alexandria in about eight days, spending one night there before
lee being for Syria, and the reason he only spent
one night was that at this point the season for
official travel to Mecca was approaching, and he thought if
(09:08):
he made good enough time, he could join a caravan
leaving out of Damascus. On the way. He stayed for
about a week in Jerusalem, but even so he got
to Damascus with enough time to spare that he stayed
there for nearly a month. Although he had been continuing
his studies throughout the trip. In Damascus, he continued them formally,
earning several official certifications in different law texts. In Damascus,
(09:32):
Ivan Batuta finally did join an official caravan bound for
Mecca that he stayed with for the rest of the
trip there, which we will talk about after a quick
sponsor break. Ivan Batuta set out with a large caravan
of pilgrims from Damascus on September one. This was more
(09:54):
than a year after leaving his home in Tangier. He
doesn't specifically say how many people were in this caravan,
but it was likely several thousand. Official caravans traveling to
Mecca were and are very large. First, they went to Medina,
which is about eight hundred twenty miles or roughly dred
kilometers away from Damascus, and the travel there took about
(10:16):
fifty days. Once they're pilgrims took part in several days
of religious rituals, including at the Mosque of the Prophet,
and then from Medina it was another two hundred miles
or three hundred twenty kilometers to Mecca, where even Batuta
finally arrived in October thirteen twenty six. After the Hajj,
which involves several days of religious observances and rituals, most
(10:40):
pilgrims returned home, but even Betuta did not. Early in
his journey, he'd had a dream of a great bird
sweeping him away over a far distance. He'd also meant
an ascetic who told him that he would meet and
offer greetings to the ascetics three brothers, one in India
when in sind and one in China. Sind is now Pakistan.
(11:01):
But aside from these more romantic ideas, even Batuta thought
that if he continued to travel, he could continue to
learn and to find work as a kadi, and instead
of turning west toward home, he went north and then
east toward what's now a Rock in the company of
returning pilgrims from that region, Although he did make several
stops along him the way, his primary goal at this
(11:22):
point was to visit the city of Baghdad. Baghdad had
been besieged and then sacked during the Mongol invasion in
twelve fifty eight, and that was a little less than
seventy years before Ivan Batuta's arrival. That sacking is generally
considered to be the end of the Islamic Golden Age,
so when Ibn Batuta went there, he was envisioning it
(11:44):
as sort of witnessing one of the great cities that
had been He also stopped in most of the major
cities in the area and took a tour up the
Tigris River. From there, he returned to Mecca with another
Hajj caravan, this time staying for at least a year,
during which time he both studied and performed the rituals
associated with the lesser pilgrimage a number of times. He
(12:08):
left Mecca again in either thirteen twenty eight or thirteen
thirty Exactly when is a little bit unclear, but whichever
it was, he spent the next two years traveling mainly
by boats to cities along the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf,
and the Arabian Sea. He went as far south as
Kilwa on the African coast in what's now Tanzania, but
(12:29):
was at the time part of the Kilwa sultan It.
After two years of mostly seafaring wandering, he once again
joined a pilgrimage caravan Sebecca, traveling over land across the
entirety of the Arabian Peninsula before observing the Hajj for
a third time. By this point, Ivan Batuta had learned
(12:49):
that the Sultan of Delhi, Mohammed Touluk, had invited scholars
to India, and that many who made their way there
were finding themselves with prestigious appointments that came along with
lavish gift. The Sultan had made a practice of specifically
filling posts with foreign visitors, and even Batuta hoped to
be one of them. But to get there and to
(13:09):
get an appointment, he needed a guide who spoke Persian
New India well and had contacts there who could help
Ibn Batuta on his way. His initial plan seems to
have been to try to find such a guide in
Jetta and then to have a relatively straightforward sea voyage
to India, but he couldn't find someone with the skills
and connections that he needed, so instead he set off
(13:32):
on a much much more circuitous route overland, perhaps thinking
that he might meet someone along the way. He first
made his way back to Cairo and from there to
the port city of Latakia on the Syrian coast, before
taking a ship across the Mediterranean Sea to Alanna in
Anatolia on the coast of what is now Turkey. And
(13:52):
he then undertook a very roundabout two year trek that
went to Constantinople, through the Byzantine Empire, across the Asian Step,
and then through Afghanistan, finally crossing the Indus River in
thirty three or thirty five. He essentially went quite far
to the north, following a zigzagging path between the Black
Sea and the Caspian Sea before dropping southeast into India.
(14:16):
If you look at a map, this was not just
an indirect way to go. Crossing the Asian Step was
also far more difficult than going by sea or by
following some of the other overland routes. Taking the path
that was both the long way and the hard way
may have been because Matuta had already seen several of
(14:37):
the cities along the Arabian Sea that they would have
passed through if he had gone that way. Instead, he
had resolved to never travel a path that he had
traveled before if there was some other option available. It
seems like it would get so problematic in a hurry,
and apparently it did. There are there are lots of
maps of his voyages online and there is very doll
(15:01):
like the arrow going two directions on the same faith,
and when it is it's usually like okay, yeah, that's
there's not really a different way to go. Ib Batuta
spent about eight years in India, where he was named
Cutty of Delhi, although for his first several months there
he spent his time accompanying the Sultan on hunting expeditions
(15:21):
rather than hearing legal cases. He also had some trouble
with money. He had purchased gifts for the Sultan, including horses, camels,
and enslaved people along the way with the hope that
it was going to help him secure a good appointment,
and although his appointment as Catty came with an income,
he just didn't have the same pool of wealth as
many of the other Deli elite to draw from. And
(15:43):
he was expected to maintain an opulent lifestyle and to
spend some of his income on gifts and payments to others,
so he was soon in debt. Apart from his financial problem, says,
years in India overall also weren't particularly easy due to
a combination of famines, uprisings, and political intrigue. At this point,
(16:04):
India had a majority Hindu population that was being ruled
by a minority Muslim government, which leads to ongoing uprisings
and religious violence. Around thirteen forty, Ibn Batuta was appointed
to lead an envoy from Delhi to China, and he
left in the summer of thirteen forty one. He was
(16:24):
tasked with ensuring the safety of a huge retinue, including
hundreds of people and gifts, including textiles, dishware, and weapons.
Although they traveled under armed guard, they were attacked by
Hindu insurgents only a few days out from Delhi. Ibn
Batuta was attacked and robbed a second time while waiting
for reinforcements after that first incident, and then he became
(16:46):
lost for six days after escaping from his captors. After
this inauspicious beginning, the expedition ended disastrously in early thirteen
forty two, when the whole fleet of four ships at
this point they had moved to a sea voyage, was
forced aground and wrecked in a storm off the port
of Calicut on the southwestern coast of India. Most of
(17:09):
their retinue was also killed in this storm and shipwrecks,
including the other two highest ranking officials that had been
dispatched from Delhi. Edmund Betuta only survived because he had
moved from the junk where the diplomatic envoy was supposed
to be sleeping, to another ship because the room that
was assigned to him on the diplomatic junk was just
(17:29):
too small for his taste. Although he wanted to return
to Delhi and tell the Sultan what had happened, he
didn't feel like he could, at least not right away.
Not only had the entire retinue and all of its
goods been lost on his watch, but he would also
have to explain why he had survived while the other
officials had not. He'd also lost nearly everything he had
(17:52):
in that storm. He wound up stranded for months before
finally finding passage to Honavar on the western coast of
India on a fleet of ships that belonged to the Sultan.
Once he got there, though, the situation was not much better.
He had hoped to find a patron and some kind
of appointment that would allow him the time and the
resources to figure out what he should do next, and
(18:15):
perhaps even to recoup some of his lost income. Instead,
he wound up spending most of the summer of thirteen
forty two and devotional seclusion, praying and reciting the Koran
twice through every day. He was basically offered housing in
a like this one person's room, and he was like, yeah,
I don't really have work for you. You can stay here, though,
(18:35):
So he basically stayed there in prayer for months, and
finally he decided to go to China on his own,
staying for a time in the Maldives and acting again
as Cutty before going on to China by sea. By
this point he had been to so many places and
could tell stories of so many other courts that he
was received enthusiastically and he was compensated generously once he
(18:59):
left them all be there's some dispute about exactly how
far into China he did go, in part because he
didn't give a lot of detail about China when he
wrote about his travels. This lack of detail has led
some critics to suggest that he did not go to
China at all. And while he probably did not get
nearly as far as the account of his trip suggests,
(19:21):
with some of that probably being embellished when it was
being written, he almost certainly did visit the more southeastern
parts of China. His lack of detail is more likely
because the Muslim population there was relatively small, and that
was really what he was most interested in learning from
and writing about. So he just had a lot less
interest in China and a lot less to say about it.
(19:43):
And it was after visiting China that iban Batuta decided
at last to return home after undertaking the Hajj one
last time. We're going to talk about all of that
after we have a little sponsor break, finally abandoning the
idea of returning to India to explain what had happened
(20:04):
to the convoy. Even Matuta began working his way toward
home in thirteen forty seven by way of one last
pilgrimage to Mecca that would be his fourth during his lifetime.
Rather than waiting for the next pilgrimage season, he took
a wandering route through Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and
in Damascus, Syria, he learned that his father had died
(20:25):
about fifteen years before. He decided to travel to Aleppo
in the summer of thirty eight, which turned out to
be just as the Black Death began moving through the region.
For the next several months, his travels took him through
cities and towns that were ravaged by the plague. For
a time, he got ahead of the spread of the disease,
but it caught up with him again in Mecca, where
(20:47):
he spent four months awaiting the Hajj. After his fourth hodge,
he began traveling finally toward Tangier, but once he arrived
there after his decades of absence, he learned earned that
his mother had died of the plague only about six
months before. Ibn Batuta didn't stay at home for long.
(21:07):
He soon set out once again for a brief tour
of Granada across the Strait of Gibraltar, followed by a
return to Africa and a tour to the south, crossing
the Sahara Desert to the Kingdom of Mali and the
city of Timbuctwo. Iban Batuta finally returned to Fez, which
was then the capital of Morocco, in thirteen fifty four,
and as far as we know, he spent the rest
(21:29):
of his life in or near Morocco. The Sultan Abu
Nan asked him to write an account of his journey,
and in doing this, Iban Beatuta worked with an Amanuensis
iban Juse, who was also a court poet. Ivan Jus
made his language poetic, added some actual poems, and probably
embellished a few things, while also bringing Ivan Matuta's account
(21:51):
in line with literary standards of the time. The end
result of all this work was finished on December fifty
five five. It's full Arabic title roughly translates to a
gift to those who contemplate the wonders of cities and
the marvels of traveling. It's more commonly known as the RelA,
although RelA is really a genre essentially a travelogue within
(22:15):
Islamic literature had been Betuta's RelA chronicles has traveled through
essentially the entire fourteenth century Muslim world. He had gone
seventy five thousand miles or a hundred and twenty thousand kilometers,
that is three times farther than Marco Polo's journeys and
three times the circumference of the Earth. Along the way,
(22:37):
he visited what's now forty different modern countries. He met
at least sixty heads of state and a wealth of
lesser leaders and dignitaries, and he served as an advisor
to at least twelve different rulers. He also met all
three brothers of the Ascetic that he had heard about
so early in his journey, and did indeed offer them greetings.
(23:00):
The RelA is about one thousand pages long, and since
he was reconstructing it from memory after the end of
his travels, it's chronology is sometimes a little bit mixed
up or vague, but otherwise it stands as a wide
ranging account of what the Islamic world was like in
the fourteenth century. The world was and still is huge,
(23:20):
but it's not at all monolithic. It's people are united
by the core belief in the Koran and by the
idea that the tenets of Islam create a bond that
is greater than ethnicity or race. Yeah, if you're if
you're looking at the chronology of his travels and you
kind of go does that make sense? You may have
even thought does that make sense? In some of this
episode so far. It's because he was basically reconstructing it
(23:43):
later on, and and sometimes talking about places that he
passed through more than one time, so sometimes a little
seems a little mixed up. As Iman Batuta traveled, he
observed the diversity of Islam, seeing how it was filtered
through Arab, Persian, Turkish, and Mongol cultures. He wrote about
how people worshiped, how they interpreted the law, and what
(24:05):
their holy sites were like, along with describing the cities themselves,
in their cuisine and their environment, and things like whether
they were clean. The book gradually reveals some of Iman
Betuta's personality and tells us a little about the world
view of an educated, devout fourteenth century Muslim. He was
a pious man who could sometimes come off as a
(24:26):
bit of a busybody, even beyond what might be expected
of a man whose job was to be a judge.
But he was also gregarious and highly curious about the world. Otherwise, though,
there's really very little about his personal life. For example,
he married at least seven women, and he had children
with at least some of them. In addition to having
numerous concubines, although none of these people play a part
(24:49):
in the text beyond the mention of their marriage or
occasionally their death. And we also get nothing about his
homecoming and what happened when he met friends and family
that he'd been separated from for almost a quarter of
a century, or when he learned how many of them
had died in the Black Death. And this was really
typical of writing at the time. It was not considered
(25:11):
really appropriate to be talking about your personal business in
public anyway, so it would have been doubly inappropriate if
he had filled his book up with a lot of
personal details about his life. So like that is not
a typical at all. Also, when we say he comes
off sometimes it's a bit of a busybody. The story
that to me typ of eyes at the best is
there was there's one part in his relo or he
(25:32):
writes about going into a bath house and some of
the men didn't have waste coverings on. And his response
to this was to go to the governor of the
town and to tell the governor of the town that
there were some men in the bath house that didn't
have waste coverings on, and then get the governor all
riled up about it, followed by a crackdown on whether
(25:53):
there were waste coverings in the bath houses. On the
one hand, there's expected that men would have waste coverings
on on the other hand, there were definitely a lot
of people involved in the situation who were like man
Ivan Beatuda business who went right to escalation on that one. Yeah.
(26:14):
So the a lot of people in their descriptions of
Ivan Beatuda use words like kind of a fuss budget
or little judgmental uh, and that that kind of uh,
that kind of account is why. So this book was
largely unknown until the nineteenth century and even in the
Arabic speaking world. Although various additions exist in libraries in
(26:38):
North Africa and the Middle East dating from the time
after it was written, it does not seem to have
been very widely read between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries. However,
in a weird turn of events, French scholars found five
manuscripts in Algeria after the French occupied Algeria in the
eighteen thirties, and these scholars began trying to piece together translations.
(27:01):
A lot of the first translations in English were very
heavily abridged, unsurprisingly because it has a thousand pages long
and a complete English language translation project started in nineteen
nine the Hackleyott Society, which is an English society that
publishes scholarly editions of primary source texts about travel in geography,
which is an amazingly specific mission. UH published the first
(27:26):
three volumes by the mid twentieth century, but the fourth
volume didn't come out until I think. And it's actually
unclear when Ibn Batuta died, although it was in the
year seven hundred in the Islamic calendar, which would have
been thirteen sixty eight or thirteen sixty nine. A two
man tangier is traditionally considered to be his, but we
(27:48):
don't actually know if that's the case today. There's also
a shopping mall name for him in Dubai, and its
courts are all themed after places that he went, and
a lot of commentators are like, I'm not sure if
I Tuda thought would have thought this was cool or not? Yeah,
he like he did. I mean, obviously, he traveled for
(28:10):
almost a quarter of a century in a time when
travel was a lot more uncomfortable and and time consuming
than it is in a lot of the world today.
But the like the fact that, um he he was
so particular about things. Uh. Sometimes people are like what
I be Tuda walk in here and be like, oh, yeah,
this is cool. I like to look at this place.
(28:31):
Or would he be more like, mmm, I'm not sure, Yeah,
we don't know. It's don't really new. Hey, Tracy, do
you have a listener mail from far Afield? Sure do uh,
and it is a correction from Jacob. Jacob says, Dear
Tracy and Holly. I love the show and have heard
almost every episode going all the way back. I'm so
glad you're covering such a fascinating and dramatic period of history,
(28:54):
especially since there is so much mythology and downright ignorance
about it. I should take a moment and note we're
talking about our dune Kirk evacuation episodes here, which she
said in the title, but I did not read the title.
I couldn't help, but notice you said. Nazi Germany invaded
Denmark and Norway in May of nineteen forty, essentially simultaneously
(29:15):
with the invasion of the Low Countries in France. I
believe the Scandinavian invasions began in early April so roughly
one month before the start of the Western Offensive, and
while certainly the two operations were well coordinated, they were
not quite simultaneous. Thanks again for the great program, Best Jacob.
Jacob is exactly right. Not only was this onecent my error,
(29:39):
it is an error I introduced in my own revisions
of the script that was like I had written it
correctly in the first place, and then as I was
you know, reading through and reading through and making sure
everything was right, I was like, what am I even
talking about? This was not in April. This was in May.
It was not in May. It was in April. I
(29:59):
had right the first time. So, uh, that is my error.
I apologize, especially because, uh, that is an error that
meaningfully changes our description of things. Um, it was not
literally the next day after invading the Scandinavian countries that
Germany invaded the Low countries. So what you're telling me
(30:22):
is that you're not a perfect history robot. Mm hmmm,
I'm super not a perfect shocking. I think this has
all of the categories of error that I hate the most.
It is a mistake I made, and not a mistake
that was like repeated a lot of places that I
also picked up. And it's also a mistake that meaningfully
(30:45):
changed what we were saying, rather than like we said,
that was Thursday and it was really Wednesday, and it
doesn't really affect anything in the long grand scheme of things. Uh,
this one did. So I apologize and thank you for
Jacob in the a couple of other people who have
written to point that out. If you would like to
write to us about this or any other podcast, where
at history podcast how Stuff Works dot com. We're also
(31:07):
on Facebook at Facebook dot com slash miss in history
and on Twitter at miss in History. Our Tumbler and
our pinterests and our Instagram are all also missed in History.
You can come to our parent company's website, which is
how stuff Works dot com and find all kinds of
information about anything your heart desires. And you can come
to our website, which is missed in History dot com,
where you will find show notes for all the episodes
(31:30):
that Holly and I have done on the show. You
will find a searchable archive of pretty much every episode ever.
I shouldn't even say pretty much. It is literally every
episode we have ever done at the show. You can
do all that a whole lot more at how Stuff
works dot com or missed in history dot com. For
(31:51):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff works dot com.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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