Ibn Battuta buys a slave girl
We went on through the town of Tim, which is in the territories of this sultan, to Aya Suluq [Ephesus], a large and ancient town venerated by the Greeks. It possesses a large church built of finely hewn stones, each measuring ten or more cubits in length. The cathedral mosque, which was formerly a church greatly venerated by the Greeks, is one of the most beautiful in the world. I bought a Greek slave girl here for forty dinars.
Ibn Battuta reaches Bursa
We journeyed next to Bursa [Brusa], a great city with fine bazaars and broad streets, surrounded by orchards and running springs. Outside it are two thermal establishments, one for men and the other for women, to which patients come from the most distant parts.
They lodge there for three days at a hospice which was built by one of the Turkmen kings. In this town I met the pious Shaykh ‘Abdullah the Egyptian, a traveller, who went all round the world, except that he never visited China, Ceylon, the West, or Spain or the Negrolands, so that in visiting those countries I have surpassed him.
Ibn Battuta travels on to Nicea, where he meets the Turkish sultan
The sultan of Bursa is Orkhan Bek, son of Othman Chuk. He is the greatest of the Turkmen kings and the rischest in wealth, lands, and military forces, and possesses nearly a hundred fortresses which he is continually visiting for inspection and putting to rights. He fights with the infidels and besieges them. It was his father who captured Bursa from the Greeks, and it is said that he besieged Yaznik [Nicea] for about twenty years, but died before it was taken. His son Orkhan besieged it twelve years before capturing it, and it was there that I saw him.
Yaznik lies in a lake and can be reached only by one road like a bridge admitting only a single horseman at a time. It is in ruins and uninhabited except for a few men in the Sultan’s service. It is defended by four walls with a moat between each pair, and is entered over wooden drawbridges.
Inside there are orchards and houses and fields, and drinking water is obtained from wells. I stayed in this town forty days owing to the illness of one of my horses, but growing impatient at the delay I left it and went on with three of my companions and a slave girl and two slave boys. We had no one with us who could speak Turkish well enough to interpret for us, for the interpreter we had left us at Yaznik.
Read More about Ibn Battuta part 42
