The Moroccan scholar and traveler who, between 1325 and 1354, covered approximately 75,000 miles across the Islamic world, Africa, Central Asia, India, Southeast Asia, and China — producing the Rihla, the most extensive account of the medieval world written by a single observer. Ibn Battuta's journeys documented the geographic reach of Islamic civilization at its maximum extent and remain the primary eyewitness source for dozens of medieval societies.
Ibn Battuta left his hometown of Tangier in 1325 at the age of twenty-one, intending to perform the hajj. He did not return home for twenty-nine years. By the time he finished traveling, he had covered more ground than any person in recorded history before the age of steam — roughly 75,000 miles across forty-four modern countries. He crossed the Sahara, visited the Mali Empire at the reign of Mansa Suleyman, sailed the Indian Ocean trade routes, served as a judge in the Maldives, traveled through the Golden Horde's territory, reached Delhi and the Malabar Coast, and made it to China. He did all of this using networks of Islamic hospitality, scholarly prestige, and the remarkable geographic coherence of the medieval Islamic world — a civilization that in the fourteenth century stretched from Morocco to Indonesia.