C.F. Beckingham

H.A.R. Gibb

This volume completes the translation of Ibn Battuta's narrative. Volume III ended with Ibn Battuta's appointment by the Sultan of Delhi to accompany an embassy to China. In Volume IV he describes his journey to the coast where he embarked near Cambay and sailed to Calicut. Here the ships which were to take them to China were wrecked. Ibn Battuta joined the Sultan of Honavar in a temporarily successful attack on Goa, and then went to the Maldives, which had not long been converted to Islam by another North African. Here he functioned as a judge, married into the ruling elite, and became involved in a plot to bring the islands under the authority of a bloodthirsty Sultan in south India. On the way to join him, Ibn Battuta found himself in Ceylon and took the opportunity to climb Adam's Peak. He abandoned the planned invasion of the Maldives, to which he returned briefly, and the sailed to Bengal to visit an ascetic in Sylhet. He claims to have visited several countries in south-east Asia, including Sumatra and Java and some which cannot be satisfactorily identified, and arrived at Ch'üan-chou in China. After going to Canton he travelled by a non-existent river to Hang-chou and Beijing. His return to Morocco, during which he witnessed the ravages of the Black Death in Syria and Egypt, and called at Cagliari in a Catalan ship, is described summarily. He made two more journeys, the first to part of Spain still under Muslim rule, which included Gibraltar, Ronda, Málaga and Granada, and the other across the Sahara to the kingdom of Mali on the upper Niger, from which he returned to Fez via Timbuktu, Gao, Aïr, the Hoggar country and Tuat. Translated with revisions and new annotation from the Arabic text edited by C. Defrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti. Continued from Second Series 141, with continuous pagination. The first two parts are Second Series 110 and 117. The index to all four parts is provided in Second Series 190. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volume first published in 1994.

The Travels of Ibn Battuta, AD 1325–1354

This is an account of the Portuguese mission which landed at Massawa on the west coast of the Red Sea in April 1520 and re-embarked 6 years later. It was the first European embassy known to have reached the Ethiopian court and returned safely from it. It was a small group of fourteen, among whom was the chronicler Alvares, who wrote the most detailed early account of the country, valuable for Ethiopian history and the history of the expansion of Europe. Alvares's account was translated into English for the Hakluyt Society by Lord Stanley in 1881. This revision makes use of sources since discovered, corrects certain errors, and modifies the style of the early version. There is an introduction, detailed annotation and a number of appendices. This is a new print-on-demand hardback edition of the volumes first published in 1961.

A True Relation of the Lands of the Prester John, being the narrative of the Portuguese Embassy to Ethiopia in 1520, written by Father Francisco Alvares

C.F. Beckingham

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