Imagine leaving your hometown at 21 years old and promising to return in 16 months, only to reappear 24 years later after surviving multiple shipwrecks, ruthless bandits, and the apocalyptic horrors of the Black Death. Born into a family of Islamic legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco in 1304, Ibn Battuta originally set out alone on a standard Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Instead, his spiritual obligation transformed into a three-decade global odyssey spanning over 73,000 miles—three times further than the journey of Marco Polo—making him the greatest traveler of the pre-modern world entirely within the physical constraints of the 14th century.

Leveraging his extensive religious and legal training as a passport to secure high-status, high-paying work, Ibn Battuta operated as a prominent medieval expatriate rather than a wandering mystic ...