Here's a game: using your place of birth as the center, how far west, east, north and south have you traveled on this planet? For me, the westernmost point is San Francisco, northernmost is Luleå (Sweden), easternmost is Moscow, and southernmost is Marrakesh.
Now think of people living in the 1330s. Who, in those days, was the most well-traveled person in history? The vast majority were born, lived and died within spitting distance of their birthplace. Who didn't? Marco Polo? Alexander the Great? Maybe a Chinese merchant traveling the Silk Road?
All signs indicate that the person was Ibn Battutah, a qadi (judge) who left his home town of Tangier, Morocco in 1325 and didn't stop traveling until 1354. What begins as a pilgrimage to Mecca by way of the Horn of Africa soon becomes a true globe-trotting journey, taking in the pyramids in Gizeh, Constantinople, the Arabian peninsula, and Central Asia, and then on to India, the Maldives, Sri Lanka, and further still, to Bangladesh, the islands of Sumatra and Java in Indonesia, and finally the east coast of China (then ruled by a descendant of Genghis Khan). But that's not all: after returning home, he goes on to visit Andalusia in Spain and travels all the way down to Timbuktu in Mali, where he meets Mansa Sulaiman, the brother of Mansa Musa, arguably the richest man who ever lived. (Of course, most of these places have different names in Ibn Battutah's day.)
Virtually everywhere he goes, there is a Muslim presence of some kind, and vast swaths of the ground he covers are ruled by Muslims. He generally gets a warm welcome by the local rulers, who are keen to hear his stories about distant lands, and receives enough horses, camels and slaves to make it to his next destination. And, miraculously, he survives everything, being none the worse for wear, escaping even the Black Death that is ravaging Europe when he's there.
Once home, he sits down and turns his experience into a manuscript that's 1000 pages long. The entire thing was translated in English in the 1950s, and a scan of all four volumes is online for free at the Internet Archive. (I've read only a 300-page abridged version.)
The story sounds almost too good to be true, and you'd have good reason to be skeptical: in Europe, one Sir John Mandeville, around the same time, wrote a travelogue filled with fantastical monsters, men with dog heads and cotton plants that grow sheep, and the Europeans eagerly ate up the baloney.
But this is in sharp contrast with Ibn Battutah, who not only describes his itinerary so meticulously that there is a Google Map of his voyages, there's also a mere handful of cases where his claims cannot be corroborated by 21st-century scholars. He write cautiously, and his caution is understandable: his claims are scrutinized and criticized by scholars when he returns, even when he tells things that are verifiably true, say, that rulers in India throw handfuls of dirhams on the ground for their subjects to scramble over. He explains what hippos are, what a coconut is and how pepper is grown and dried.
Equally surprising, compared to the highly dramatic style of European books of the time, is his non-judgmental, objective and detached style: only very rarely does he express any kind of emotional reaction to people and customs that to him must have seemed perfectly alien. He reports his experiences with a neutrality that could make a present-day cultural anthropologist jealous.
In other words, the book is a contemporary portrait of the world in the Middle Ages (except for the Americas, of course) that is without equal. Maybe I'll eventually sink my teeth into the full, 1000-page version, but for now, I'll cherish the abridged and heavily annotated version.
