Ibn Battuta

In June 1325, a twenty-one-year-old judge's son left Tangier for Mecca. His name was Ibn Battuta. He intended to make the hajj — the pilgrimage every Muslim who can afford it is expected to complete at least once. He did not intend to be gone for twenty-nine years. But then, nobody who leaves home at twenty-one intends to become the greatest traveller in medieval history. These things happen to you, and you only understand them afterwards.

The journey from Tangier to Mecca is roughly 3,000 miles. Ibn Battuta covered that distance — and then kept going, apparently unable to stop. By the time he returned to Morocco in 1354, he had travelled approximately 75,000 miles. Marco Polo, the most famous traveller of the medieval world, covered about 24,000 in his lifetime. Ibn Battuta tripled him. The Venetian gets the brand recognition. The Tangérois gets the mileage.

The itinerary reads like a fever dream written by someone with access to unlimited airline miles and no return ticket. From Mecca he went north to Baghdad, then south to the Horn of Africa. He visited Mogadishu and the coast of Kenya. He crossed the Black Sea to the territory of the Golden Horde, then accompanied one of the Khan's wives to Constantinople. From there to Central Asia, across the Hindu Kush into India, and eight years in Delhi as a judge — a career detour that would look bizarre on a modern CV but made perfect sense in the 14th century, when a well-educated Muslim from Morocco was welcome in any court that operated under Islamic law.

The sultan of Delhi sent him as ambassador to China — a voyage that included a shipwreck in the Maldives, a stint as a judge there (he tried and failed to enforce the veil, which tells you everything about the Maldives), and finally a passage to what he claimed was Beijing. Modern scholars are sceptical about China. The descriptions, dictated years later, contain errors that suggest he may have borrowed from other travellers' accounts. But even if you subtract China, the documented journeys are staggering: Persia, Iraq, East Africa, Anatolia, the Crimea, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, Bangladesh, Southeast Asia.

He returned to Morocco in 1349 to find both his parents dead — his mother from the plague, his father years earlier. He didn't stay long. You wouldn't either, with that particular combination of grief and restlessness. He crossed to Spain, visited Granada, then returned to Morocco and set off across the Sahara to the Mali Empire. He reached Timbuktu in 1352 and was unimpressed, which is the kind of review that only a man who has seen Constantinople and Delhi and the Maldives can credibly deliver.

In 1354, the Sultan of Morocco ordered him to dictate his travels. The result was the Rihla — formally titled "A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Travelling," which is a title that earns its length. It remains one of the most important travel documents of the pre-modern world.

The greatest traveller of the medieval world was not a Venetian merchant with a ghost writer. He was a judge from Tangier who left for Mecca at twenty-one, kept walking for three decades, and came home to find that home had moved on without him. The statue in Tangier shows him mid-stride. It would have to.