June 14, 1325

Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta leaves Tangier for the hajj

He left for Mecca with no companion and no travelling party, at twenty-one by solar reckoning, and remembered afterwards that the parting grieved him and both his living parents.

Thursday, 2 Rajab 725 AH

In the account later worked into his Rihla, Ibn Battuta says he left his birthplace, Tangier, on Thursday, 2 Rajab 725 AH, intending to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and visit the Prophet's tomb at Medina. Hamilton Gibb's standard English rendering equates that day with 14 June 1325.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam converts the same Islamic date to 13 June. The weekday and the lunar date are secure; the Gregorian equivalent is not.

Alone on the road east

He says he departed alone, with no companion or travelling party — not in a protective caravan. He was 22 lunar years old, 21 years and 4 months by solar reckoning.

Both parents were living, and he recalled that the separation caused sorrow to him and to them.

After reaching Tlemcen he stayed three days to obtain supplies, then rode after two Tunisian ambassadors, and later continued with Tunisian merchants.

A pilgrim, not an explorer

Ibn Battuta described an overpowering religious impulse and a long-held desire to see Mecca and Medina. The surviving passage does not say he left to explore the world or to break a travel record.

The Rihla was dictated and edited decades later — the scholar Ibn Juzayy shaped the recollections into their surviving literary form — so the vivid first-person departure scene is retrospective, not a diary entry written that day.

The historian Ross Dunn's count puts the eventual journey at more than 73,000 miles, a modern route reconstruction rather than a distance Ibn Battuta himself measured or claimed.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 6 sources not yet audited Traditional date

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

Traditional date. This date is the conventional one, not one fixed by a contemporary record.

What the sources leave uncertain

The Rihla gives the secure Islamic date and weekday: Thursday, 2 Rajab 725 AH. Hamilton Gibb's standard English rendering equates this with 14 June 1325, while the Encyclopaedia of Islam converts it to 13 June. This reflects medieval lunar-date conversion problems.
The account was dictated and edited decades after the departure, so the vivid first-person scene is retrospective rather than a diary entry written that day.
The 73,000-mile figure is a modern route reconstruction, not a distance measured or claimed numerically by Ibn Battuta.