I've made it halfway through The Travels of ibn Battuta and have concluded that he didn't make the trip, just cobbled together a lot of things from other people's stories. Disappointing.
How did you come to that conclusion?
The way the book is written led me to that conclusion. Have you read the book?
It goes something like this: I left from here, then I went there, and there, and there, and there ad infinitum with little or, more often, absolutely no description of the travel or the places. I have read a lot of ancient travelogue and none of the others have been written in this manner. Without exception the authors go to pains to describe the places they have seen. Battuta does not.
Then he purports to arrive in some place or other and goes on at some length about miracles he supposedly witnessed and saints he supposedly visited, or recounts stories of the same likely circulating with the sufis of his day.
When he got to Palestine his supposed itinerary there convinced me that he'd never been there in person, and had never seen an accurate map of the area. From that point on I sort of thumbed through the rest of it reading bits here and there and concluded that he sat on his butt in Morocco plagiarizing and stitching together tales from wandering sufis or merchants.