Ibn Jubayr
Ibn Jubayr
1145–1217
Pilgrim
Journey to Makkah . Ibn Jubayr produced one of the earliest and most influential accounts of a pilgrimage to Makkah. He left Granada in his native Spain in February 1183, embarking at Ceuta on a Genoese ship that over a month-long period took him to Alexandria via Sardinia, Sicily, and Crete, all non-Muslim lands. After making the pilgrimage, he went to Baghdad, the then-declining metropolis of the Abbasid khilafah, and then took the caravan route across Syria from Mosul to Aleppo eventually reaching the Mediterranean coast at Acre. Once again boarding a Genoese ship, he endured a harrowing shipwreck off Sicily before finally returning to Spain in yet another ship in April 1185. He made further voyages in later years, dying during a sojourn in Alexandria in 1217. His description of his first journey, Rihla Ibn Jubayr (Travel Account of Ibn Jubayr), is the only one to survive. It became so influential a model for later travelers that extensive portions of it were sometimes quoted without acknowledgement. Though he employed a reportorial day-to-day format, he also included passages in rhymed prose that seem more colorful than accurate.
Source
Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, translated by R. J. C. Broadhurst (London: Cape, 1952).