Khān

A caravanserai or ruler's title — a word with two meanings that Ibn Battuta encountered constantly in both senses throughout Volume One. The khans (inns) that dotted the trade routes across Persia, Central Asia, and Anatolia provided travellers with shelter, water, and basic provisions, forming an essential part of the infrastructure that made long-distance travel possible before the modern era. The khans (rulers) of the Mongol successor states — the Golden Horde, the Ilkhanate — were among the most powerful figures Ibn Battuta met, several of them Muslim converts whose courts blended steppe nomadic tradition with Islamic practice in ways he found both fascinating and occasionally disturbing. His accounts of the Golden Horde under Khan Uzbek remain among the most detailed medieval descriptions of that polity.

As understood in the classical tradition of Ibn Battuta and the scholars of his school.