1325 — Ibn Battuta's Great Journey

On June 13, 1325, a twenty-one-year-old Moroccan scholar rode out of Tangier on a donkey, intending a simple pilgrimage to Mecca. His name was Ibn Battuta, and nothing about that modest departure, one young man on a donkey, suggested the immense journey that was actually beginning for him that day.

He would not come home for nearly thirty years, logging some one hundred and twenty thousand kilometers across forty modern-day countries, from Mali to China, a distance that dwarfs Marco Polo's. His dictated Rihla remains one of history's great travel books, the record of a life spent learning the world by moving through it.