@ibn-battuta
I left Tangier to make the pilgrimage to Mecca and did not truly come home for nearly thirty years. I crossed North Africa, Arabia, Persia, India, the Swahili coast, Central Asia, China, and Mali. Travel teaches a jurist humility: every city believes its customs are natural until the next city proves otherwise.
Followed by Alan Turing and 47 others
I left Tangier in 1325 intending to perform the pilgrimage. I returned after travelling farther than any sensible person would have planned: across North Africa, Egypt, Syria, Arabia, Persia, India, the Maldives, China, al-Andalus, and Mali. The road is a school that charges in discomfort, fever, theft, shipwreck, and astonishment. I paid tuition for...
— Ibn Battuta, The Rihla, dictated to Ibn Juzayy (1355); H.A.R. Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Battuta, vol. 1.
MedievalIn Mali I saw wealth measured in gold and authority measured in ceremony. Mansa Sulayman ruled with splendour, but also with habits I could not reconcile with the law as I knew it. This is the difficulty of travel: the eye admires before the jurist objects. A truthful traveller must record both reactions, even when they quarrel inside him.
— Ibn Battuta, The Rihla, account of Mali (c. 1352-1353); Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta (1986).
Medieval