Ibn Battuta - full name Abu Abdullah Muhammad ibn Battuta - was born on 24 February 1304 in Tangier, a Mediterranean port on the Moroccan coast, into a family of Islamic legal scholars. The family was of Arabised Berber descent, belonging to the Lawata tribe. Under the Marinid dynasty, Tangier was a lively intersection of Andalusian, African, and Mediterranean trade. Young Muhammad studied at a Sunni Maliki school - the dominant legal tradition in the Maghreb - and was trained to be what his father and grandfathers had been: a qadi, a judge. His patronymic, Ibn Battuta, literally means "son of a duckling," a family nickname whose origin he never quite explained. At 21 he took his religious training seriously enough to make the hajj. He also, as he later admitted plainly, "craved adventure." Both motivations were real. One fed the other for a quarter century.

The classic Hajj route from Morocco ran east along the North African coast through Tlemcen, Bejaia, and Tunis. Ibn Battuta joined caravans for safety, married a bride in Sfax and promptly separated from her over a dispute with her father - the first in a pattern of short, practical marriages that would feature throughout his travels. He arrived in Alexandria in spring 1326 and, from Cairo, took the less-traveled route up the Nile and east to the Red Sea port of Aydhab, turning back after a local rebellion blocked it. He detoured to Damascus, spent Ramadan there, then traveled south with the great caravan that Mamluk troops escorted to Mecca. He completed his first Hajj in November 1326 and took the honorific El-Hajji. Any reasonable pilgrim would have turned around. Ibn Battuta decided instead to go to the Mongol Ilkhanate. He went to Najaf to visit Ali's tomb, detoured through Iran - Isfahan, Shiraz, back across the Zagros to Baghdad, whose ruins from Hulagu Khan's 1258 sack still marked the cityscape.

After another Hajj, he headed south. From Yemen he sailed to Zeila and Mogadishu on the Horn of Africa, describing Mogadishu at the zenith of its prosperity - rich merchants, high-quality exported fabric, a sultan fluent in both Somali and Arabic. Then down the coast to Mombasa and Kilwa in modern Tanzania, which he called "one of the finest and most beautifully built towns." He noted the coral-stone architecture, the extension of the Great Mosque of Kilwa, the reach of the Sultanate's authority from Malindi to Inhambane. Riding the monsoon back north, he eventually crossed Anatolia, the Black Sea, and the Central Asian steppe to reach India in September 1333. There he served as a qadi in Delhi under Muhammad bin Tughluq, "the wealthiest man in the Muslim world at that time" - and one of the most erratic. For six years Ibn Battuta oscillated between favor and suspicion of treason. He finally escaped on a diplomatic mission to the Yuan dynasty of China, was ambushed and robbed by bandits, and after a ship sank and another was seized by a Sumatran king, spent nine months as chief judge of the Maldives, where he married into the royal family of Sultana Khadija.

He reached Sri Lanka, Bengal, and - by his own account - southern China, though modern scholars debate whether he actually got as far as he claims in the Chinese interior. He returned to Morocco in 1349, traveled to al-Andalus, and then, in 1351-1354, crossed the Sahara to the Mali Empire - a final great journey that took him to Timbuktu and up the Niger River. The Rihla, dictated to Ibn Juzayy al-Kalbi at the court of the Marinid sultan Abu Inan Faris, records this all: the hospitality of the fityan craft associations in Anatolia, the humility of Sultan al-Hasan of Kilwa, the pearl-diving at Hormuz, the pirates of the Indian coast, the curious customs of the Maldives where marriages were treated casually and small dowries made unions "a convenient temporary arrangement for visiting male travellers," as he noted with an anthropologist's matter-of-factness. He was not always a fair observer - he criticized Maldivian women's traditional toplessness and forced changes when he was qadi - but he was a rigorous one. His descriptions of place are the finest we have from the 14th-century Islamic world.

Ibn Battuta died in 1368 or 1369, probably in Morocco. The Rihla circulated in Arab scholarly circles for centuries before European orientalists rediscovered it in the 19th century. For modern readers, the book is an astonishing index of an interconnected medieval Muslim world - a world where a Moroccan could find hospitality from Turks in Anatolia, serve a Sultan in Delhi, mediate trade disputes in the Maldives, preach at a Persian court, and always find a mosque to pray in and a qadi to share a meal with. The linguistic, legal, and scholarly networks of Islam were, in Ibn Battuta's time, genuinely global. His total distance of roughly 75,000 miles exceeds what Zheng He traveled by sea and what Marco Polo traveled on the Silk Road. He was not a soldier or a merchant. He was a judge who kept saying yes to the next road, and the record of what he saw is one of the great gifts the 14th century left to ours.