Ibn Battuta sets out from Tangier

June 1325

A twenty-one-year-old Moroccan scholar left home intending to make the hajj to Mecca. He would not return for twenty-four years. He would cross three continents, serve sultans in Delhi and Sumatra, survive shipwrecks and brigands, and leave a Rihla that became the greatest travelogue of the medieval world, covering some seventy-five thousand miles of the inhabited earth.