One 14th-century Moroccan scholar left home at 21 and didn’t stop traveling for 29 years, covering an astonishing 73,000 miles across the medieval world. His journey makes Marco Polo look like a weekend tourist.

This episode follows Ibn Battuta from Tangier to Mecca, the Swahili coast, Delhi, the Maldives, China, and Mali, exploring how his Islamic legal training became a passport to wealth and high office across the Dar al-Islam. It also confronts the uncomfortable truth: his famous travelogue, the Rihla, blends genuine observation with plagiarism and likely embellishment, making him a strikingly human, flawed chronicler of his age.

• How his Maliki legal education let him secure lucrative judge positions from Africa to India
• His near-death adventures: kidnapping, shipwreck, freezing in the Hindu Kush, and surviving the Black Death in Damascus
• His contradictory conduct in the Maldives, enforcing strict modesty laws while marrying and divorcing four wives
• The debate over warrior princess Urduja and whether key encounters were real or invented
• Evidence that passages were lifted word-for-word from Ibn Jubayr’s account written 150 years earlier