Afeef Ahmed

The broader Indian Ocean world also took note of the Tibi family’s activities, as shown by Chinese imperial records and European travelogues. As mentioned, Marco Polo provides an outsider’s glimpse around 1293. In addition to noting Ma’bar’s horse imports, Polo specifically records that an ambassador (‘Chāmalittin’) from "the Sultan of Ma bar" arrived at the court of Kublai Khan in the 1280s.

Persian-language chronicles from the Ilkhanate era provide detailed testimony of the Tibi brothers' influence in Ma'bar, illuminating the context behind the Kayalpattinam inscription. The Iranian historian Rashid al-Din (d. 1318), in his universal history, included reports on the Pandya Kingdom's fall. As summarized by the 19th-century Missionary Robert Caldwell, Rashid al-Dīn writes that by the late 13th century (c. 1290) the Pandya realm was effectively divided:

Kayalpattinam, a historic port town on the southeast Coromandel Coast of Tamil Nadu, was a prominent center of Islamic learning and Indian Ocean trade from the medieval period onward. Yet it has not received the same scholarly attention as the ports of the Malabar Coast on the opposite side of peninsular India. Important Malabar entrepots are well attested in medieval travelogues and chronicles, whereas Kayalpattinam's historical footprints have been comparatively understudied despite frequent mentions in pre-modern sources suggesting its role as a crucial link connecting the eastern and western Indian Ocean worlds. This imbalance owes partly to the nature of available evidence: Kayalpattinam did not experience sustained Muslim dynastic rule, and thus its material-Islamic heritage (mosques, tombstones,