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Ibn Battuta was an Arab explorer. He lived in the fourteenth century. He travelled all over the world. At this time, travelling was very difficult and very dangerous. The people of Europe and North Africa learned a lot about the world from him.

Early Life
Ibn Battuta was born in Morocco on 25th February 1304. He studied very hard at school. He learned to speak and write Arabic. In June 1325, when he was twenty-one years old, he travelled to Mecca. But after that, he did not go home. Instead, he started to travel. First he went to Iraq, Iran and Turkey. Then he returned to Mecca. He stayed there for three years and then sailed down the east coast of Africa. Then he returned to Mecca for a year. In 1330 he decided to work in India. It took him a long time to get there. First he went to southern Russia where he met the daughter of the leader of Constantinople. He took her to Constantinople. Then he travelled back through southern Russia. Then he crossed the Himalayas into India. He reached Delhi and worked for a rich Muslim king.

India and China


He stayed in India for eight years. He visited many interesting places and spoke to many interesting people. He remembered everything. Then the king asked Ibn Battuta to go to China. He sailed away in a ship, but the ship sank in a terrible storm. Ibn Battuta lost everything. In 1344, he reached China. He travelled around China for two years and then decided to return home. In 1349, he returned home to Morocco. But he found that his mother and his father were dead. His mother had died just a few months before he returned. But his travels were not over. After only a few days, he travelled north to Spain and then he travelled south to Timbuktu in West Africa. In 1354, he returned to Morocco. He met a writer. Ibn Battuta told the stories of his travels to the writer, who wrote everything in a book. The book tells us a lot about the world in the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta died in 1368. Ibn Battuta travelled over 100,000 kilometres on his travels. Nobody travelled more until railways were invented in the nineteenth century.

CLIL360 2014 All rights reserved. May be photocopied for use in the classroom. Images from Wikimedia Commons and are in public domain.

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