Description
In 1325, a weeping twenty-one-year-old legal student rode out of Tangier, Morocco on a donkey. He carried no gold, no trade goods, no letters of introduction from any king. He carried an education. Twenty-nine years and seventy-three thousand miles later, he had traveled three times the distance of Marco Polo — across forty-four modern countries on three continents — sustained by nothing but a Maliki legal credential and the hospitality of the medieval Islamic world. His name was Ibn Battuta. And his journey reveals the hidden infrastructure of the first global civilization the world ever produced. This episode traces the full arc of that civilization through one man's extraordinary life. From the Sufi lodges and waqf endowments that fed and housed him across three continents, to the crumbling Pharos Lighthouse he entered as one of its last eyewitnesses. From the staggering scale of Mamluk Cairo — with its free hospital, music therapy, and six hundred thousand inhabitants — to the ruins of Baghdad, still haunted sixty-nine years after the Mongol sack that destroyed the House of Wisdom. From the frozen steppes of the Golden Horde where three fur coats couldn't keep him warm, to the court of Muhammad bin Tughluq in Delhi — a brilliant philosopher-sultan who debated jurisprudence between elephant executions. We follow Ibn Battuta through kidnapping in a cave by Indian bandits, shipwreck at the spice port of Calicut, nine chaotic months as chief judge of the Maldives, and a crossing of the Sahara to the gold-rich Mali Empire. We watch him survive the Black Death in Damascus, where Muslims, Christians, Jews, and Samaritans walked barefoot through the dying city together — carrying their holy books, weeping, praying side by side. And we watch him come home to find both parents dead and a world that no longer knew him. The medieval Islamic world was not perfect. But it connected more of the planet, more deeply, more institutionally, than anything before it. The proof is a book dictated entirely from memory, surviving in five manuscript copies, forgotten for five centuries, and now recognized as one of the most important travel documents in human history. Marco Polo traveled between civilizations. Ibn Battuta traveled within one. That difference changes everything.