Contrast of Two Travelers

Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, two traveller writers of the ancient age, with diametrically styles and views on regions they visited. The former, a Genoese Christian; the latter a Muslim. But the reason for the difference in their attitudes didn’t lie in their religion per se: rather, it lay in who was in power back then, writes William Bernstein in his book on trade, A Splendid Exchange.

 

With the rise of Islam, the trade routes from India and China to the West fell entirely under Muslim control. The Europeans were literally locked out. Ibn Battuta, being a Muslim and thus a part of the power of the age, thus behaved like a “surly Western package tourist”: he complained about the food, the quality of hotels and the fact that the locals cheated him during his visit to China. So unhappy was Battuta in China that he didn’t even appreciate the Chinese invention of paper money. Like the “archetypal American”, he was instead exasperated by the “funny money” of China: why don’t they just accept the dinar, he whined. But he was impressed with all aspects of trade in China: the large port city of Zaitun, and on the relative safety of travel within China. After all, that’s what the Muslims cared about back then: trade and money.

 

Marco Polo, on the other hand, was from the powerless Christian group. So his travelogue, The Travels of Marco Polo, focused on other things:

“The fantastical stories – of lands where cows were sacred, where widows threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyre (all India)… where the ground oozed with a gooey substance that burned (oil fields of Iraq)… and of a place which was so far north that the sun never set in summer or rose in winter – struck Europeans as the product of a fevered imagination.”

But of course, it was all true. The accuracy of Travels is even more remarkable considering that many of the descriptions were passed to Marco second- or third-hand, and often about places he had never even visited! And Polo loved China’s religious and cultural diversity:

“The country is delightful. The people are idolators.”

 

No wonder that the Polo’s jumped at the chance when they were invited to Kublai Khan’s China. While Ibn Battuta fretted over the bribes that had to be paid to gain court access in Delhi, and went to China practically at gun point.

 

All of which is why Bernstein sums up the two explorers this way:

“In many ways, the Genoese Polo and the Moroccan Battuta provided mirror images of the epic medieval wanderer: Polo was Christian, intensely curious about the peoples, customs and places he visited, and almost completely dependent on the goodwill of the Mongol khans of China and central Asia. By contrast, Battuta was Muslim, profoundly uncurious about the non-Islamic world, and achieved his greatest fame, wealth and influence in the Muslim court of Delhi.”