A two-year Journey under the Arrows of the Plague: the Black Death in Ibn Baṭṭūṭa’s Travels

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?