Ibn Battuta

Ibn Battuta (1304-1368/69) was a Muslim scholar and traveller from Tangier in present-day Morocco, renowned as one of the greatest travellers of the premodern world. Over roughly three decades beginning in 1325, he journeyed across North and West Africa, the Middle East, Central Asia, South Asia, China and the Iberian Peninsula, covering a distance far greater than that of contemporaries such as Marco Polo. Late in life he dictated an account of his travels, commonly known as the Rihla, which remains a major primary source for the social, political and religious life of the 14th-century Islamic world.